Bulletin#90: New look, new platform, new software

This edition's lead story is our new partnership with Platform9, inked in March, creating access for members and customers to state-of-the-art cloud computing. Platform9 perfectly complements our existing Time services by unifying hybrid infrastructure - including on- or off- premise bare metal, VMware, AWS, GCP and Azure - with Openstack-as-a-service. This is open standard, open source cloud technology that we offer deep expertise in from delivering for researchers via ARDC since 2012. Platform9 also offers the best, simplest and most scalable platform for Kubernetes managed container service and Fission managed functions-as-a-service available. This is the first of what we think will be a series of important private sector partnerships as we adapt to the changing pace of eResearch technology post-cloud.

It's also a great time to publish a bulletin because we've just submitted our latest ARC LIEF consortium application for HPC access funding with lead CI Professor Evatt Hawkes of UNSW. Consortia such as these offer core membership benefits by creating research opportunity and financial leverage for every participant.

Our presence in the southern states of Australia continues to expand and the closely collaborative relationship we enjoy at La Trobe University continues to produce firsts. In this case, a long term Space contract has allowed us to invest to improve our Shazam! data teleport software in ways to solve broad instrument data capture challenges that are entirely reusable. You can read about how this works for Dr. Connie Darmanin's serial crystallography team at the La Trobe University Institute for Molecular Science.

This quarter saw us tally up the 2018 metrics achieved by Learn.intersect.org.au as we trained a record 3368 researchers so we've shared a kind of report card for you to see how we did. This year's targets have been further increased, along with the palette of courses.

Our featured team member article profiles Peta Ryan, eResearch Analyst on campus in Armidale at the University of New England.

Finally, our Board of Directors remains evergreen and the March board meeting introduced renowned Deakin University CIO William Confalonieri, replacing UTS CIO Dr. Christine Burns. Professor Keith Nugent also recently departed as he took up the DVCR role at the Australian National University. Chrissy and Keith move on with the gratitude and acknowledgement of the Directors and our management team.

With our web reboot, identity refresh, new partnerships and many new opportunities under wraps I look forward to bringing you much more breaking news this year.

Very best regards,
Marc Bailey
CEO