Stories by: Rodney Gedda

Sydney-based Verb IT is the first company in the Asia Pacific region to provision an HP Performance Optimised Datacentre (POD) next-generation data centre in a shipping container. The new Verb DC site where the POD is located is a standard industrial warehouse in Wyong on the NSW Central Coast (one hour north of Sydney). Verb DC is schedueld to go live in September after a 14-week project, including the POD delivery time. In what is being painted as a big win for the Central Coast IT industry, the new POD will provide computing services to local businesses and the world.

Raw network bandwidth out of Australia is set to get a two-fold increase with a new $US400 million undersea cable project announced in Sydney today.

Business doing service-oriented architecture (SOA) for better IT management shouldn’t assume they will automatically be ready for cloud computing, says a Gartner software analyst.

Well regarded Sydney-based IT industry analyst, Phil Hassey, has announced being made redundant as vice president of Springboard Research on Twitter and other social networking portals.

The Australian Taxation Office is preparing to release a Linux port of its AUSkey authentication software with Ubuntu being the reference distribution for testing and development.

After nine months of development, the Novell-backed openSUSE Linux distribution has released version 11.3 which adds support for netbooks, touchscreen interfaces and a cloud-based backup and synchronisation service.

Turning the black art of tracking customer feedback through blogs and social networking services into a science has become a successful service at Sydney-based startup BuzzNumbers.

National Linux advocacy body Linux Australia has added its support for the federal government's Standard Business Reporting initiative by planning an open source SBR integration project, meanwhile work begins at the ATO on AUSkey for Linux.

The $11 billion infrastructure sharing agreement between Telstra and the NBN Co is set to expedite the deployment of fibre broadband potentially freeing up the telco to concentrate on improving its high-speed Next G wireless network for mainstream broadband access.

Credit card giant Visa has entered the micropayment processing space with payclick, a pre-paid hosted service aimed at teenagers purchasing online line content such as music and games.