Revealed: NBN Co's IT strategy

NBN Co has adopted a ‘buy over build’ approach to IT, choosing to adopt cloud computing services and commercial off-the-shelf software rather than develop its own applications.

Today, iTnews brings readers an exclusive download from the brains of NBN Co’s IT team, with an interview featuring:

• Claire Rawlins, CIO of NBN Co
• Bill Barnett, GM of enterprise architecture at NBN Co
• Gordon McMillan, head of IT infrastructure at NBN Co
• Edwin Butler, head of operations and applications support at NBN Co

Our interview with the leaders of NBN Co's IT team covered many topical areas in information technology circles – but we have chosen to focus on three specific themes over the coming pages.

• On page two, read about NBN Co’s approach to cloud computing.
• On page three, read why NBN Co prefers to deploy commercial-off-the-shelf software.
• On page four, read about NBN Co’s focus on ITIL and other IT standards.

In brief: NBN Co's IT

• Led by Claire Rawlins, NBN Co’s IT team looks after the technology needs of 700 staff.
• NBN Co's corporate IT operates from data centres in Sydney and Brisbane.
• The team prefers commercial off-the-shelf software over developing its own applications.
• NBN Co uses Oracle software for Project Management, ERP, database and CRM.
• The company prefers to consume software as-a-service when available, and when data can be held locally.
• NBN Co expects service levels of five nines from SaaS suppliers.
• This week, NBN Co will start using Oracle CRM on-Demand from a Sydney data centre, has also embraced a hosted project management system from Atlassian for its developers and hosted IVR system from IPscape in its call centre.
• The company chooses to keep email and other data-heavy apps in-house, as well as development of its intranet portal.
• The team designs IT systems to the ITIL 3 standard
• NBN Co runs a fleet of Windows 7 PCs in-house, uses Citrix XenApp for application deployment, and won’t be going down the BYO Computing path any time soon.
• The company has deployed Cisco’s UCS hardware platform to run internal applications, running VMware server virtualisation.
• NBN Co contracted IBM for systems integration under an three-year deal

Read on for more...