TECHNOLOGYONE has announced its new Single Touch Payroll functionality, to meet new Australian Tax Office (ATO) requirements in reporting employees payroll information.

Single Touch Payroll (STP) was introduced by the Australian Government for organisations with 20 or more employees, with effect from July 1, 2018.

With the support of the ATO, TechnologyOne has adopted a controlled rollout for customers, enabling them to integrate STP into their businesses between  July 1, 2018, and April 30, 2019. 

TechnologyOne CEO Edward Chung said this approach would minimise disruption on customers’ day-to-day operations, by extending the STP compliance deadline away from the end-of-year time frame.

“STP signifies a marked shift, requiring employers to report employee year-to-date payroll data to the ATO, directly from their payroll solution, each time they pay their employees,” Mr Chung said.

“Our STP functionality is an integrated part of our enterprise solution, meaning customers don’t need to worry about expensive middleware or gateway providers, and complex integrations.

“Payroll information will be delivered directly from our software to the ATO via our secure SaaS platform, so customers – both on premise and SaaS – will benefit from the superior security we build at every level of our leading-edge SaaS solution.”

Mr Chung said TechnologyOne worked in partnership with the ATO to roll out STP functionality “in a considered, safe and secure manner, to reduce risk for customers”.

“We’ve taken this approach to provide a smooth upgrade path for customers and minimise the operational impact on their organisations,” he said.

“TechnologyOne’s solution has been built on the latest ATO specifications. By working in close collaboration with the ATO, our Human Resource and Payroll software is now recognised as a government-approved solution, providing customers with a secure and compliant system to meet the ATO’s legislative changes.

“In keeping with our ‘Power of One’ promise, we’ve taken responsibility for both delivering the solution and ensuring a successful implementation, making us completely invested in our customers’ STP compliance.”

www.technologyonecorp.com

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By Jim Poole >>        

THE DEMAND is there. The hype is there. But is Australia really ready for 5G?

In one sense, the answer is, "Absolutely.”

The fifth-generation of wireless broadband technology will bring an exponential increase in data speeds that will change how people interact with the internet. For example, download time for a high-definition (HD) movie could go from an hour to a few seconds. 5G can also power up remote surgery.

And some say truly autonomous vehicles aren’t possible without it. So 5G will connect a higher density of devices, people and things in smaller areas –  faster and with lower latency than ever. It promises to inspire an astounding array of innovations and new services.

Who wouldn’t want that? 

However, many of these applications depend on ultra-low latency and a level of throughput that today’s networks aren’t built to consistently deliver. To best prepare for 5G, Australian businesses need to move IT to the edge of the network, close to the users who are actually consuming these services.

That’s going to require a shift in mindset that puts the edge, and interconnection, at the centre of network design.

THE NEXT REVOLUTION

The move to 4G was a big leap itself, as it enabled the richer mobile video content we currently enjoy, as well as the proliferation of anytime, anywhere, any device connectivity. But 5G will take it to another level:

Speed. 10x over 4G is a common estimate, with variables such as whether a carrier prioritises range over speed affecting just how much quicker 5G will be.

Latency. 5G latency can dip to 1 millisecond, when the end user and target platform are pretty close – within 4-6 miles of each other. 4G latency is variable, but the best of 5G is 60 to 120 times better than average 4G latencies.

Bandwidth. 5G standards allow for exponentially wider bands than 4G and major increases in bandwidth.

McKinsey focuses on several use cases 5G will enable – provided they’re preceded by serious network upgrades. The use cases include the enhanced mobile broadband that has people downloading huge video files in seconds and which supports significant advances in virtual reality.

5G networks will also be able to better keep pace with the explosive growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) and all its current and yet-to-be discovered applications, as 5G enables up to one million connections per kilometre at very low power.

And 5G makes mission-critical control possible with 1 millisecond latency, opening the door for new applications that demand absolute reliability, such as in healthcare, utilities or autonomous driving.

McKinsey says all these use cases will require network performance to increase 10-fold over current levels across all network parameters, including latency, throughput, reliability and scale. That means heavy investment is ahead in all network domains.

McKinsey estimates infrastructure spending will continue to increase at the high end at its historic range of 20-50 percent annually, while Moor Insights & Strategy predicts 5G will drive IT hardware spending to $326 billion by 2025. And much of this spending will be aimed at moving IT services to the edge.

The answer: high-density deployments at the edge.

EDGE TOWARDS ANSWERS

In a 5G world, a traditional, centralised network architecture that backhauls traffic from users to a distant corporate data centre isn’t just prohibitively costly, it’s a non-starter. There’s too much data, and latency tolerance for many 5G apps is too low.

Take the example of remote surgery, during which a surgeon using virtual reality goggles and haptic gloves (which let users feel and touch in virtual reality), can operate on a patient half a world away via a robot. This can’t happen over a 4G network.

Latency isn’t the primary issue, though the high variability of latency on a 4G network ultimately would make it too risky if there weren’t bigger problems. The real reason is that remote surgery requires a level of throughput 4G can’t handle.

Of course, latency isn’t just a problem in serious situations such as surgery. It can cause the lag that ruins a 5G-fueled multi-player virtual reality (VR) video game, as well.

Reducing distance between these types of applications and users is the only way to ensure low latency. For 5G applications to work as they should, network operators will need to massively deploy small cell technology in extremely high densities at the edge, where their users are consuming services.

In a typical city neighborhood, for instance, dozens of shoebox-sized small cells might be mounted on public infrastructure, like telephone poles and street lights. In less populated areas, operators will need to significantly increase the density of existing networks by building macro cell sites along the way.

NEW TECH FOR 5G

This need for high-density IT deployments isn’t just about a data influx or the need for proximity. Many 5G network operators say they plan to maximise data speed by using millimetre wave – extremely high frequency spectrums.

But millimetre wave also has limited range and can be disrupted by conditions as common as humidity and rain. Heavy concentrations of small-cell technologies are needed to offset that.

Establishing these high-density deployments at the edge can be easier on an interconnection platform that spans the top global markets everywhere.

Interconnection – the private data exchange between businesses – is the fastest, most secure, lowest-latency connectivity there is, and it will be a critical part of the 5G revolution. Companies need the flexibility to expand as the edge evolves. They also need access to their clouds, networks, data and partners, so they can directly connect to whatever they need, wherever they need it.

A global interconnection platform that’s always growing and always welcoming new industry ecosystems and ecosystem partners can be a place that helps companies handle whatever 5G has coming.  

Not everyone is ready for 5G yet because not everyone is committed to networks designed around the edge.

But a global interconnection platform that gets companies to edge with speed, safety and cost-efficiency can get a lot of people a lot closer to 5G than they’ve ever been.

www.equinix.com.au

• Jim Poole is the vice president of business development for Equinix, the global company providing interconnection solutions to power digital business.

By Jeff Smith >>

DIGITALISATION is changing everything, ushering in new business models, new economic realities, and a whirlwind pace of innovation that makes even quarterly planning cycles seem slow-footed.

Some enterprises have responded to this maelstrom of competition by going all-in on public cloud, lured by such features as pay-per-use, high resiliency, and self-service.

Many chief financial officers (CFOs) soon experienced cloud sticker shock, however, with cloud computing expenditures consuming close to a third of the company’s IT budget. 

The majority of enterprises still use on-premises infrastructure, preferring to stick with traditional three-tier infrastructures – such as Storage Area Networks (SAN) with dedicated ‘storage, compute and network' – due to concerns about control, data privacy, service level agreements, and, above all, risk.

However, the moment that gave rise to three-tier infrastructures has passed. In this new era of digital transformation, legacy infrastructure optimised for legacy applications actually increases risk – competitive, budgetary, and financial.
A true enterprise cloud – hyper-converged, on-premises, and hybrid – not only offers security, reliability, and flexibility, it accelerates innovation while significantly reducing risk.

COMPETITIVE RISKS

The speed and magnitude of digital disruption is occurring at an unprecedented scale, making rapid time-to-market and agility in the face of changing market conditions more urgent than ever.

Examples abound of well-established companies undone, seemingly out of nowhere, by insurgent upstarts employing digital technologies to redefine the rules of engagement, both for customers and competitors.

But even as digital disruption introduces new levels of volatility, it also enables first and early movers to quickly dominate their markets, putting relatively slow movers at a striking disadvantage.

“Wait and see,” once a prudent risk-management approach to innovation, now risks making companies irrelevant.

Many companies now speed up innovation by experimenting with a portfolio of product options: fail-fast, learn, and then, like venture capitalists, direct more resources toward getting the winners to market while de-funding the losers.

This process demands an agile infrastructure, one that deploys resources in minutes, rather than days, and that offers deployment optionality, enabling developers to choose the right hardware, hyper-visor, runtime, or cloud for the application at that moment. And, when conditions inevitably change, they need an infrastructure that lets them seamlessly move the applications to the new optimal location.

BUDGETARY RISKS

The procurement process for traditional infrastructures thwarts optionality, and competitiveness, by requiring companies to make a big, risky investment up front, based on forecasting demand and requirements from three to five years in advance, across a very diverse set of components.

Once the company has made this investment, it is effectively tethered to a specific vendor. Getting some return on the sunk cost of the investment takes precedence over using the most optimal deployment and configuration options, which help you grow your business.

Business cycles are shorter and less predictable, and competitors are more nimble.

Enterprise clouds, such as those from Nutanix, Dell EMC, Lenovo, and IBM, provide bite-size consumption and incremental investment, as little as a server at a time, enabling companies to change direction on demand and make purchasing decisions in a fraction of the time.

FINANCIAL RISKS

One of the key objectives of digital transformation is removing complexity from all points in the value chain, as complexity invariably increases risk.

Traditional infrastructures are highly complex, with one system layered upon the next, and each adding to the cumulative risk of service failure and cascading business costs from lost revenue, lower productivity, and damaged reputation.

Complexity permeates routine maintenance as well, such as upgrades and security patches, which devolve into costly, weeks-long ordeals, involving multiple teams, weekends, and pulling systems offline.

Many mission-critical systems can never go offline, which is why some companies choose to go years without ever upgrading or installing security patches. The needless complexity of legacy infrastructures thus locks companies into the myriad shortcomings, inefficiencies, and risks of outdated applications.

True enterprise clouds mirror the imperatives of digitalisation, eliminating complexity and risk by design.

Software-defined and self-healing, they suffer 97 percent fewer outages and enable features such as one-click rolling upgrades that can take place in the middle of a workday, without interruption to your service or your business.

WHAT CAN HAPPEN WHEN YOU DECREASE RISK?

One of our customers, a large insurance provider in Japan, now launches its new insurance offerings in one-third of the time at one-third of the cost incurred with their previous infrastructure.

Their enterprise cloud has helped the company become both more agile and innovative.

Another customer, a large New Zealand university, illustrates how enterprise cloud reduces budgetary and financial risk.

The university needed to modernise its student management system, but had no precise estimate of the amount of resources they would need over time.

So they started with a small deployment, and as the project expanded, they simply added servers, including mixing different configurations and generations of appliances, keeping up with demand from the development team and the load on the system.

As the deployment grew, they also retired some of the older appliances. The management simplicity and stability of their cloud allowed them to remove these systems during business hours while the student management system was in use.

Their enterprise cloud eliminated both the risk of making a massive IT investment based on guesswork and the risk and expense of system downtime.

While traditional infrastructures may appear less risky, their familiarity masks a whole host of risks, from disabling technical debts, to stymied innovation, to reduced competitiveness.

My advice is to make sure that your enterprise has an infrastructure designed for the digital era.

Be the disruptor, not the disrupted.

www.nutanix.com

Jeff Smith is a senior director of systems engineering across the Asia-Pacific region for enterprise cloud services company Nutanix. He helps businesses to answer the key question: How should we rethink risk and infrastructure in the era of digital disruption?

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NEW Federal Government investments in resources projects for the Bowen Basin will strengthen the region’s role as Australia’s premier mining technology hub.

That is the view Queensland Resources Council (QRC) chief executive Ian Macfarlane, who welcomed the Turnbull Government’s $500,000 investments in four projects under the METS Ignited Growth Centre Bowen Basin Cluster program.  

Combined with industry contributions, the total value of the projects is more than $1.1 million, according to the QRC.

“Mining technology is an area in which Australia is truly a world leader,” Mr Macfarlane said. “Mackay is an ideal location to invest in new projects that will maintain our international competitiveness, given its proximity to our high quality coal fields and the concentration of industry expertise.

“It’s particularly good news that one of the investments will be in an underground simulator that can get people job-ready faster so they can take advantage of the great careers in the resources sector.

“The world wants our resources, so we need the skilled workforce to make sure we can take advantage of the booming global demand.

“There are more than 1400 jobs currently on offer in the Queensland resources industry, and more than 500 of those are in the Mackay region.

“Under the Growth Centres model, Australian Government funding is matched by industry investments. It’s great to see such a strong show of confidence in the resources sector and its long-term future. The resources industry is here to stay,” Mr Macfarlane said. 

“It’s been a stellar week for Mackay, hosting the Queensland Mining Awards, a bumper Queensland Mining and Engineering Exhibition, and the announcement from the Palaszczuk Government of progress on establishing the $3.6 million Mackay Resources Centre of Excellence.

“The QRC congratulates the Mackay-based Resource Industry Network (RIN) on its role in helping secure these investments. The QRC looks forward to working with RIN and both the Federal and State Governments to make full use of Mackay’s mining strengths, and most importantly create more jobs.”

Mr Macfarlane said the resources sector contributed more than $1 billion in wages alone for the Mackay region, with a further $2.5 billion spent on local products and local community investments.

www.qrc.org.au

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