Too Good To Ignore

Sydney Morning Herald

Tuesday April 1, 2003

STAN BEER

Things are looking up in the government area for Brisbane-based IT services company Dialog, judging by the jobs recently advertised on its website. Jobs on offer in Canberra and Darwin include DB2, CICS and COBOL programmers and J2EE and .NET senior designers.

As is the case with quite a few IT companies in Queensland, Dialog is a bit like ancient Rome. Nobody paid much attention to it until it was too big to ignore. Dialog is now one of Australia's larger local IT services companies, employing about 500 permanent staff and, believe it or not, no contractors.

The company prides itself on providing plum working conditions for its employees. If you're lucky enough to land a job at Dialog, you can expect to get a "top quartile salary package", which includes a fully maintained car of your choice, company-sponsored healthcare, income protection insurance and three months of sick leave for prolonged illness or injury.

According to Dialog marketing director Bob Tisdall, the current recruiting drive is nothing unusual for the company, which takes on at least 40 new staff each year.

Tisdall says the advertised vacancies are to bolster its small but growing Canberra and Darwin offices, where it has ongoing government business. In the Northern Territory, Dialog does a lot of outsourced work for the Territory Government. Tisdall says: "We don't recruit for specific jobs - all our staff are permanents. We're broadly based and there's still a lot of work around for good people in old legacy systems and Oracle, as well as all the new work bubbling up in J2EE and .NET. The message is that good people are still in demand."

InFinite possibilities

Those looking for a way onto the payroll of AMP or ING or the Sydney office of IT services provider Dimension Data might try Finite Recruitment - if you can get them to return your calls. The eastern states body shop is making much of how it has won preferred supplier contracts with the three employers. Only AMP is really new business but three wins sounds better than one win and two renewals.

As to how many jobs are to be found at these employers, Finite managing director Tracy Thomson assures us there are plenty on offer at all three.

"ING is doing a lot of integration work with ANZ Funds Management at the moment and we are one of only three suppliers for that," says Thomson. "Dimension Data is currently very aggressive in the market and its services area is in growth mode. We had record trading levels last month." Thomson says AMP is expected to yield massive volumes of work for IT contractors because of its recent workplace restructuring. "They have cut back as much as they possibly can and there are signs that they will be hiring contract resources rather than permanents to fill their shortfalls."

Apart from Finite's three new clients, Thomson says the Federal Government is rapidly

becoming the recruiter's most important customer. "There is a lot of spending in Canberra around defence and health and we're looking to develop a stronger presence there. We are in the process of opening a Canberra office now."

Opening new doors

Fujitsu chairman, philanthropist and multicultural advocate Neville Roach has called on ICT professionals to help

indigenous Australians enter the ICT workforce. Roach addressed 110 people at a NSW branch forum of the Australian Computer Society last month. He said ICT people were among the most privileged people of the information age and had a responsibility to help others, including indigenous Australians, to bridge the digital divide.

As a result of Roach's speech, the ACS is asking indigenous Australian ICT professionals to contact the ACS by email at membersupport@acs.org.au to gauge the current participation rate in the profession.

Moving heads

Marconi Australasia has appointed Gordon Spence as commercial director. Spence joins Marconi from Telstra.

Before Telstra, he worked with Fujitsu, BT in Australia and GEC-Marconi in Britain.

Greg Boulton has been appointed chairman of Australian transport logistics software company Moveit. Bolton is also the president of Port Adelaide Football Club and serves on the boards of eight organisations in South Australia.

Enterprise software vendor BMC Software has promoted Simon Price as vice-president of marketing and business unit field operations for Asia-Pacific, based at the BMC Software Melbourne office. Price was the local director of marketing and business unit field operations at BMC. He previously held marketing positions at Oracle, Computer Associates and DMR.

Former South Australian Minister for Health and Minister for Information Economy, Dr Michael Armitage (pictured), has been appointed by high performance hardware vendor SGI as director of sciences for Australia and New Zealand. SGI plans to use Dr

Armitage to help sell its high-performance computing expertise to biosciences research institutions. Dr Armitage, a former member of the South Australian Liberal government, was appointed Minister for the Information Economy and Government Enterprises in 1997.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

I would sum up the current market for chips and chip equipment as a nascent recovery that is at risk. -- RICHARD TORTORIELLO, an analyst at Standard & Poor's (New York Times)