WHAT INNOVATION MEANS TO GLOBAL INTEGRATION

WHAT INNOVATION MEANS TO GLOBAL INTEGRATION 

 

In 1996, and inspired by its then executive director Professor Trevor Cole, the Warren Centre for Advanced Engineering brought focus to bear in Australia on the importance of innovation. The annual Warren Centre Innovation Lectures, which commenced in that year, have since played an important role in raising awareness of technology and innovation in Australian industry and in creating role models.

The Australian Innovation Research Centre at the University of Tasmania has recently identified five key dimensions of a healthy innovation system to be strengthened by government action, ie opportunity identification; knowledge creation and distribution (including higher education and research); business development and production capabilities; financial risk management; and knowledge and other technological infrastructure.

The industry-led Electronics Industry Action Agenda, being implemented by AEEMA, is focusing on at least two of these areas - opportunity identification and business development and production capabilities. This Action Agenda, and other like science/technology related agendas, will be strengthened by the Howard Government's recently announced industry policy which focuses on global integration. Put simply, our innovation system needs to be globally 'market facing' and marching to the tune of identified opportunities and challenges which can be realised by the application of our hitherto untapped technological capabilities and abilities.

Australian innovators and technology integrators must be 'globally integrating' within a national, government policy framework that better 'backs Australia's ability' and is assisting a more collaborative industry sector to actively seek out these new, rapidly emerging market opportunities.

Angus M Robinson, chief executive, AEEMA

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WHAT INNOVATION MEANS TO IT DATA RECOVERY

WHAT INNOVATION MEANS TO IT DATA RECOVERY 

 

The IT sector is an extremely fast-moving one, and one that thrives on continued and often overlapping innovation. There are new and highly impactful developments all the time. While these are often of great value, there is always the possibility that this proliferation of solutions and the speed with which they are released, make it increasingly difficult for even the most tech-savvy manager to keep abreast.

Technological innovation in this sector needs to do three things - make life easier, be more accessible and drive down costs. This sounds good in theory, but is not always achievable in practice. Though when you think about it, that's exactly what is happening as better technology, which is often created for commercial applications, is now accessible to the broader community. Simplification, easier access and lower cost are obvious driving points for consumers at all levels, and anything suppliers can do to make life easier is well worth the effort.

To provide a range of technology solutions that are easy to use, we are focusing on accessibility, cost reduction and ease of support. Backing up data is an essential aspect of any business these days. What we are trying to do, in simple terms, is changing the way data is backed-up. Acronis has met this challenge by responding with support for virtualisation, image transport and improved flexibility in the backup and recovery process. Our solutions compress data and store it virtually across a network, reducing the number of physical servers and increasing the utilisation of existing servers. Network storage also lends itself to more efficient use of computing resources, and aids in speeding up data restoration when required.

The future of back-up in virtual locations, across many networked towers, can not only save a lot of money but also save a lot of energy, time and resource

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WHAT INNOVATION MEANS TO IT HARDWARE

WHAT INNOVATION MEANS TO IT HARDWARE 

 

It is important to understand the distinction between invention and innovation. Being a technology-oriented company, invention is naturally at the heart of our business. However, gaining a competitive edge is not just about developing new and unique products. To withstand the competition and succeed in our industry, great products need to be accompanied with increasingly faster time-to-market, high quality, competitive cost and, above all, impeccable service.

We have a philosophy at ASUS: Focus on the fundamental and results. This philosophy was derived in the earliest days of the company's inception, and is still with us today. It means it is vital to carry out the basic essentials in everything we do, examine the outcomes, before moving forward. Always start with your desired view which relates to think through and execute through. This approach applies for all that you do and strive for the ultimate goal.

With the threat of climate change at the world's doorstep, ASUS is an active participant in the worldwide effort to protect the environment, and our focus has turned green with the GreenASUS project. A major initiative includes green design where we monitor and seek to eliminate the use of toxic chemicals in manufacturing as well as ensuring our products are recyclable. ASUS' commitment to taking full corporate social and environmental responsibility also includes providing a healthy and safe working environment for our employees.

Ted Chen, Managing Director, ASUS

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WHAT INNOVATION MEANS TO IT SECURITY

WHAT INNOVATION MEANS TO IT SECURITY 

 

Innovation in IT security is in the approach taken to managing risk. From our point of view, this entails a proactive and unified approach, which means shifting the landscape of the security market.

In order to survive unprecedented change related to security with the everyday challenges of new viruses, internal and external risks, data leakage, malware and phishing, it is vital you know everything that you have to protect and what weaknesses exist on your network. Once this has been done, how do you control and report that all your network and data assets remain at the desired state of security? The risks of a disaster happening are high if this is not done; and more importantly, how can you claim you are well governed?

According to the 11th Annual CSI survey, virus attacks, unauthorised access to network, lost and stolen laptops and mobile hardware, and theft of proprietary information or intellectual property account for more than 74 per cent of financial losses. Also, 75 per cent of Fortune 1000 companies fell victim to data leakage in 2006. And 53 per cent of organisations would never know what data was on a lost USB device.

Companies must identify new and existing security platforms that integrate many features into one suite. A combined solution will enable organisations to use one suite for real time vulnerability assessment, remediation, validation, policy management and enforcement, and reporting across the entire enterprise. This provides unified protection and control of all enterprise servers and endpoints. Innovation is often about simplification.

This proactive approach manages risk far more effectively than reactive security that, in the words of the IDC research director Charles Kolodgy, "drives a maddening environment of ad hoc and emergency updates to signatures, patches and security policies."

Chris Wood, director, PatchLink Australia and New Zealand

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WHAT INNOVATION MEANS TO MOBILE PAYMENTS

WHAT INNOVATION MEANS TO MOBILE PAYMENTS 

 

In the last five years, the phenomenal growth of the global mobile phone market has led to product margins being eroded as global competition commoditises the products. Our commitment to invest in human capital, recruiting good R&D thinkers, resourcing for the technology evolution and choosing the right partners has been essential for us to champion technology initiatives and harness this growth.

As a builder of new technology, we know the value of having partnerships with companies that are excited by the innovations, will champion technology and take new applications to market.

We wanted to prepare the way for mobile network operators, as well as transport operators, retailers, banks, credit card companies and providers of digital services to offer their own services securely over mobile networks. The outcome has been a development enabling mobile operators' networks to be used securely to load new applications and personalise handsets where and when the consumer chooses.

Over the last 12 months, we carefully selected two key partners to ensure that we could drive the growth and sustainability of mobile communications by delivering trusted payment capabilities for the next generation of mobile phone handsets.

Mobile phone operator's network can securely load new applications when the consumer chooses, and select the secure payment mechanism at their convenience.

The combined innovative strengths of G&D and our partners will propel the delivery of credit card functions, transit tickets or other storage and payment information to mobile phones. Of course, we do have a secondary objective, to make this the fully interoperable global standard for the world's new mobile systems.

Juliana Kennedy, managing director, Giesecke & Devrient Australasia

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