Stories by: Howard Dahdah

The tasks in Laef Olson’s working hours can be rather varied. Olson, who is the CIO at Software-as-a-Service vendor RightNow Technologies is on the one hand responsible for IT security and the organisation’s information systems, while on the other he spruiks the strategy and vision for the company's on-demand hosting platform. On many occasions Olson gets a direct audience with company CIOs. What makes it easier for Olson to get traction to the upper levels of management is his past. He has been group vice president of global technology operations of Travelport and Orbitz Worldwide. And before that CTO of cars.com. In these roles he was also a consumer of SaaS products. It is that experience that he uses to relate to customers when on the road. Olson briefly stopped over in Australia last month where CIO Magazine asked him about the maturity of SaaS.

On this occasion we speak to Steve Bourne, creator of the Bourne shell, or sh. In the early 1970s Bourne was at the Computer Laboratory in Cambridge, England working on a compiler for Algol68 as part of his PhD work in dynamical astronomy. This work paved the way for him to travel to IBM’s T.J. Watson Research Center in New York in 1973, in part to undertake research into compilers. Through this work, and a series of connections and circumstance, Bourne got to know people at Bell Labs who then offered him a job in the Unix group in 1975. It was during this time Bourne developed sh.

With Microsoft increasingly talking up cloud computing it is not unexpected that Avanade, the consultancy dedicated to using the Microsoft platform, and which was co-founded by Microsoft, is starting to talk up the benefits of running services in the cloud. To get a little more of a local insight where he thinks the market is positioned and what Avanade can offer organisations, we spoke to Craig Dower, managing director, Avanade Australia.

The University of Adelaide will be moving over 16000 student email accounts to Google Mail.

If employee headcount is any indicator, security is one industry which the recession is having no impact on. In fact, according to several vendors in Australia, the need for organisations to stay secure, regardless of the economic climate, is leading to an increase in staff numbers.

Its CEO told his staff that it was akin to giving someone a heart and lung transplant while they are in the middle of a marathon -- without stopping. And that pretty much was what it was like for Jetstar last weekend as the low cost airline embarked on its largest IT overhaul since it took flight in 2004.

The Debian Project is expected to release Debian GNU/Linux 5.0, codenamed ‘lenny’, this Saturday.

iiNet will lodge its defence in the Federal Court today to claims it has infringed the copyrighted material of leading film studios and the Seven Network.

Some Optus corporate customers in the Sydney CBD experienced an interruption to their telephony and DSL services on Monday afternoon following a power failure in one of the telco’s data centres.

ninemsn is the latest technology venture to feel the effects of the financial recession with the organisation announcing job cuts today.