Stories about: Centrelink

The federal government's survey on the perception and use of open source software throughout agencies is still being finalized, but representatives from the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO) are already talking up the results.

Almost three years after signalling its intention to rationalize its IT infrastructure, national welfare agency Centrelink is beginning to see the fruits of its labour.

Australian JBoss users are bracing themselves for an Oracle raid in the wake of mounting speculation that the software giant's CEO Larry Ellison plans to include the J2EE application server provider in his ongoing, open source acquisition spree.

Australia's latest whole of government CIO, Ann Steward, has used her first public speech to make all the right political noises and warn government CIOs and IT managers they must clean up their own backyards and learn to share infrastructure with their peers without quarreling.

Following the release of the open source Eclipse-based Business Intelligence Reporting Tool (BIRT) last month, in-house projects may benefit from a more standardized way of integrating company information.

The man in charge of enforcing whole-of-government IT cohesion, Special Minister of State Senator Eric Abetz, has publicly backed calls from Federal Privacy Commissioner Karen Curtis for a wider review of Australia's privacy laws.

To enable greater application interoperability and a migration path for its abandoned middleware, Centrelink has started developing a service- oriented architecture with the open source Eclipse development environment.

In an effort to consolidate its server architectures and platforms, Queensland Transport will evaluate migrating some 300 NetWare, Solaris, and Windows systems over to Linux, according to the department's IT innovation and planning unit leader Sam Higgins.

Sun Microsystems' president and chief operating officer Jonathan Schwartz will visit Australia next month to talk about his vision for the company. His visit comes at a time when many local enterprises - including high-profile names like Centrelink and Telstra - have opted for commodity Intel machines in favour of the more traditional Solaris on Sparc to run key parts their infrastructure.

As part of a $312 million infrastructure refresh project, Centrelink will migrate at least 450 Windows servers over to Linux and join the small number of enterprises running the open source operating system on the mainframe.

The federal government has no plans to support legislation which requires open source software solutions to be included in all future departmental ICT contracts, and will continue to uphold a neutral stance on open source software, the National Office of Information Economy (NOIE) has stated.