Corporate Australia is expanding too quickly. There are now 800,000 companies in Australia and the Australian Securities Commission has to keep tabs on all of them.
Its computer, an IBM MVS-based mainframe housed in the Attorney-General’s Department’s Belconnen computer section, is expected to run out of capacity in June, 1995. The ASC had projected this more than a year ago and continued its lease on the equipment till then. It thought it would be a good opportunity to move to open systems.
With open systems you do not pay a huge software fee for the operating system, but you do pay more for the dozens of different applications that are used on the terminals that hang off it. Hardware maintenance costs are also far cheaper because it is an open system and anyone’s hardware can hang off it, so you get the benefit of competition.
A year ago the ASC thought that might be as much as $800,000 a year.
In February it formally put out a request for tender. Last week it announced that, alas, it had found that none of those in the short-list could meet the June 30, 1995, deadline caused by the ending of the lease and the capacity overload.
So it has put its migration to open systems on hold. Big Blue IBM is expected to be the major beneficiary because the ASC will now seek a replacement of the IBM with an IBM compatible mainframe from the best of the four main suppliers, which means IBM will continue to get the software licence fees at least.
Fortunately, the ASC has now realised that the $800,000 project was a bit optimistic and in fact the on-going costs will be about the same for IBM-compatible as open systems for its present requirements, but it acknowledges that in the future the open systems environment might be more cost effective.
The ASC has two major computers: the one in Canberra which deals with keyed in company data and the one in Taralgon in Victoria which stores and retrieves images of documents (such as annual returns) of companies.
In the past lawyers, nosy journalists and bureaucrats doing company searches have got a vastly improved service from the ASC.
Instead of physically going to the state office where the company was registered (or sending a paid agent) and shuffling through reams of unindexed paper, they can log in by modem from the office or home and search the database by company or personal and retrieve lists of documents that any company has filed with the ASC (stored on the computer in Belconnen).
Then they can request a copy of any document (by number code), giving their own fax number. The request goes to the computer in Victoria which retrieves the computerised image and sends it to the fax number.
It is faster and more accurate. Also, the companies search “”office” is open from midnight to midnight. But like all good things it costs.
The ASC’s business development director, Guy Corrigall, assures the 3000-odd users that they will not notice the upgrades going on in the background.