Paul Wallbank – Brilliant Communications

Author: Paul Wallbank

  • The cost of the cloud: How the disrupters are being disrupted

    The cost of the cloud: How the disrupters are being disrupted

    A common factor when talking to tech companies is their talk of disrupting industries, they themselves are not immune from change though.

    This week networking giant Cisco announced they would cut seven percent of their workforce, nearly 5,500 employees, as the company deals with the shift to software defined networking equipment continues.

    Industry commentators are warning Cisco are not alone as software and cloud based services change the tech industry with Global Equities Research’s Trip Chowdhry estimating the sector may shed up to 370,000 positions this year.

    Today I had the opportunity to ask Autodesk’s Pat Williams, the company’s Senior Vice President for Asia Pacific, about the challenges facing companies transitioning to the cloud. At the beginning of the year Autodesk announced they would be cutting ten percent, over 900 jobs, as part of a structuring plan.

    “I think there was a model that we had that as we moved to a subscription business that said we would see a bit of a drop in revenue and we realised our gross margins would be pressed,” he said.

    “What we were trying to do was right-size the business,” Williams continued. “Sometimes you need to do that. It was a very intentional forward looking move we made.”

    Autodesk and Cisco are far from the first tech companies to suffer from the software industry’s shift to the cloud. Microsoft have been probably been the business most affected by the change.

    Cisco themselves have been dealing with this shift for a decade as well, with a major restructure in 2011 that saw 6,500 jobs cut.

    What is clear in a transitioning industry is that Microsoft, Cisco and Autodesk are far from alone in making cuts. As Autodesk’s Williams points out, it’s probably best for managements to be doing this proactively rather than waiting for the changes to force their hands.

    The stories of Cisco, Autodesk and Microsoft show all industries are facing changes. Assuming you’re safe in any sector is brave thinking.

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  • Protecting yourself online

    Protecting yourself online

    What can consumers do to protect themselves online? Nuix’s Chief Information Security Officer, Chris Pogue, believes it’s all about sticking to the basics.

    “It’s honestly easier than you think. It’s basic IT hygiene.” “Just the basics – bad passwords, reutilisation of passwords. There’s password managers available for ten dollars a year. Don’t reuse passwords.

    “Close your wi-fi, don’t broadcast your Wi-Fi SSID. Make your PSK password longer than normal. Just make sure that you’re being smart and you’re exercising due diligence and you can stop a lot of attacks.”

    Pogue also points out no computer, or device, is unhackable. The point with security is to make your devices less attractive to opportunistic cybercrooks.

    “If you make it a little bit harder, the attacker have an ROI for their time. It’s a business, a multi-billion dollar business. They’re not going to mess around with you if you’re messing up their gross margin. Just make it not cost effective.”

    “Nothing is unhackable but you just make it so it takes too much time,” he says.

    One useful resource for home users is the Australian Signals Directorate’s Top Security Tips for the Home User. While basic, that advice is well worth while for those looking at protecting their systems.

    Paul travelled to Las Vegas for the Black Hat conference as a guest of Nuix

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  • The moment Australia’s innovation dreams died

    The moment Australia’s innovation dreams died

    It started so well but has ended in a whimper. I’ve just filed a story for Diginomica on how Australian’s Innovation Agenda died, strangled by the nation’s complacency.

    While writing it, I found the moment Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s credibility evaporated. At a media stunt in suburban Sydney, Turnbull and his treasurer Scott Morrison visited the Mignacca family who own two speculative properties and had just bought another for their one year old daughter.

    That stunt illustrated everything that is wrong about modern Australia’s investment and taxation policies. The Mignacca’s could be improving their skills and education, they could be setting up a business to provide the jobs and growth that was the cornerstone of Turnbull’s re-election campaign or they could be developing innovative new products for their industries.

    Instead they are speculating on property – and borrowing heavily to do it.

    The Mignacca’s are doing nothing wrong and are responding rationally to the incentives in Australia’s tax system as well as doing exactly what their peer and parents did, speculating on property to secure their retirement.

    Not that this strategy is without risk, like 85% of the Australian workforce both of the Mignacca’s jobs are in domestically facing service industries and in the face of an economic downturn the young couple could find their properties falling in price at the very time they can’t afford to keep them.

    In ditching the Innovation Statement and adopting the comfortable rhetoric of his predecessors, Turnbull betrayed the Mignaccas, Australia’s economy and his own stated view about the nation’s property addiction.

    Moreover, he killed any credibility he had in being able to recast Australia’s economic future.

    One suspects history won’t be kind on Malcolm Turnbull and the day he travelled to the Mignacca’s home will go down as the moment he lost the future.

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  • Being awesome

    Being awesome

    Last night I went along to the Awesome Foundation’s Sydney chapter‘s celebration of dispensing two million dollars in grants.

    The Awesome foundation trustees and ambassadors meet once a month, throw a hundred dollars into the pot and grant a thousand dollars every month to the most awesome pitch they hear. Past Sydney winners have included super pollinators for native bees, Friday lunches for at-risk youth and setting up a rooftop garden for refugees.

    What’s particularly impressive about the Foundation is that how the grants come with no strings. It’s a really good way to create grass roots projects.

    Hopefully we’ll be seeing more programs like the Awesome Foundation, and more people like the trustees who make it possible.

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  • P&G focusing on Facebook is bad news for media

    P&G focusing on Facebook is bad news for media

    Consumer goods giant Proctor and Gamble has announced they will be dialling back their targeted advertising on Facebook, as they discovered being too precise turns out to stifle sales.

    It turns out that big companies need scale, not precision, so to grow sales they need to be engaging with more people and not restricting their message to niche groups.

    Given the different natures of businesses it’s not surprising to see strategies that work for one group fail dismally for others, but it’s interesting how targeting turns out not to work so well for mass market products.

    The losers though in the P&G story are smaller websites as Wall Street Journal quotes the company’s Chief Marketing Officer as saying they will focus more on the big sites and move away from niche players.

    Mr. Pritchard said P&G won’t cut back on Facebook spending and will employ targeted ads where it makes sense, such as pitching diapers to expectant mothers. He said P&G has ramped up spending both on digital sites and traditional platforms. One category the company is scaling back: smaller websites that lack the reach of sites such as Facebook, Google and YouTube.

     

    Again we’re seeing the early promise of the web failing as economic power continues to be concentrated with a few major platforms. This is also terrible news for media organisations as big advertisers – P&G are the world’s biggest spender – focus on a few sites and increasingly ignore local or niche news publications.

    There’s also the quandary of where the content that Facebook’s users share will come from, with the advertising shifting away from media companies – new players such as Buzzfeed and Huffington Post as well as the old established mastheads – to Google and Facebook, there’s less funds to create interesting and shareable stories.

    P&G’s move is very good for Facebook’s and Google’s shareholder but the future media models still seem a long way off.

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