renai42 - Slashdot User

Submission + - Australian state bans IBM from all contracts after payroll bungle (delimiter.com.au)

Submitted by renai42 on Wednesday August 07, 2013 @03:04AM

renai42 writes: If you don't follow Australian technology news, you're probably not aware that over the past few years, the State of Queensland massively bungled a payroll systems upgrade in its Department of Health. The issues resulted in thousands of hospital staff being underpaid or not paid at all, and has ballooned in cost from under $10 million in budget to a projected total cost of $1.2 billion. Queensland has now banned the project's prime contractor, IBM, comprehensively from signing any new contracts with any government department, until it addresses what the state says are IBM's project governance issues. Kind of a big deal for Big Blue. And it's happened before — the US EPA did the same in back 2008.

Submission + - Western Governments ban Lenovo on Chinese spying grounds (delimiter.com.au) 1

Submitted by renai42 on Sunday July 28, 2013 @11:20PM

renai42 writes: If you've been in the IT industry for a while, you'll know that Lenovo's ThinkPad brand has a strong reputation with large organisations for quality, dating back to the brand's pre-2005 ownership by IBM. However, all that may be set to change with the news that the defence agencies of key Western governments such as Australia, the US, Britain, Canada and New Zealand have banned Lenovo gear from being used in sensitive areas, because of concerns that the Chinese vendor has been leaving back doors in its devices for the Chinese Government. No evidence has yet been presented to back the claims, but Lenovo remains locked out of sensitive areas of these governments. Is it fearmongering? Or is there some legitimate basis for the ban?

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