Teachers Credit Union was founded in 1966 when a small team of like-minded individuals wanted to improve the finance options available to teachers and their families. Initially known as the Hornsby Teachers Association Credit Union, the organisation grew swiftly, becoming the NSW Teachers Association Credit Union and rapidly adding and developing new services. Forty-five years later, the original membership of 29 has expanded to more than 155,000 and the organisation now has 400 employees and offices in Western Australia, New South Wales and the Australian Capital Territory.

Most of Wellington City Council’s IT system runs in a modern Windows environment, but rate payments, an important customer-facing service, were reliant on 20 year-old VAX and Alpha systems, which were close to the end of their useful lives. The Council’s IT department did not wish to incur the high cost of rewriting the software applications running on the original VAX and Alpha systems in order to transfer these functions, as well as the large amount of stored data that related to them to a new Windows environment, since all Council IT budgets were under pressure as a result of the current economic downturn.

Tomago Aluminium had been running one of their key production systems on an aging DEC Alphaserver for the past eight years. While the proven software running on this OpenVMSbased system was a good functional fit, the age and reliability of the platform was a significant cause for concern. For Tomago, the challenge was to find a means of upgrading and modernizing their computer hardware, while avoiding the significant costs associated with migrating to a new hardware platform and rewriting their applications and programs. An emulator package, which would theoretically enable the existing software to

All of Trend Windows & Doors critical operating systems – including product design, manufacturing, and sales, were reliant on an aging DEC VAX 7840 VMS server released in the mid 1970s. It had reached capacity, and since the cost of rewriting all the company’s operational systems would have run into millions of dollars, Trend was considering the purchase and commissioning of a second aging VAX system in order to increase capacity, while retaining their current software applications. While this would have been a less costly solution, there were concerns that a second system might

In a country of weather extremes it’s no wonder that record-breaking numbers of Australian households have installed air conditioners in the past decade. It’s a trend that surveys suggest will only continue in the decade ahead. For air conditioning vendors the surge in demand is driving revenue and company growth. As with any industry however, successfully capitalising on this boom requires tight business management, efficient processes and a solid underlying infrastructure. So what does a company do when its 30-year old telephone system is suddenly being asked to deal with a rapidly growing number of

Despite the calls from management text books for ever-greater speed, Fujitsu General (Aust.) Pty Limited understands that not all decisions should be rushed.  As one of Australia’s most successful and best known providers of air conditioning products, the company has learned that sometimes it pays to pause and fully consider a move before rushing in. That’s why, when Fujitsu General first began to consider introducing virtualisation into its corporate data centre, the company conducted a two year trial to evaluate what the technology could offer and how it could best be deployed. Matthew Barnes, Fujitsu