Dimension Data has released the findings from its Network Barometer Report 2011, now in its third year.

IAB Australia today announced a record 218 entries in the 2011 IAB Awards, an increase of 19% from the number of entries in 2010’s Awards. Judging is now open until mid June and finalists will be announced shortly after then. Tickets are already selling fast for the IAB Awards ceremony on 28th July, 2011 when the winners will be announced.

Dimension Data, the US$4.7 billion global IT services and solutions provider today unveiled its refreshed brand identity, and at the same time announced that its Asian subsidiary, Datacraft, has been rebranded to Dimension Data.

When multi-billion dollar IT group, Dimension Data, wanted to educate its 12,500 employees around the world about why it had refreshed its corporate brand identity, the South African based company called on its founder, and longtime CTO to demonstrate why it was important for not only people, but also companies to keep up with the times.

Dimension Data Learning Solutions will now officially be known as DDLS following a refresh of its corporate brand. The change, which was announced today, has been made to reflect the company’s expanded portfolio and positioning as a full learning solutions provider.

IPL Communications today announced that the LifeSize® Team 220 video product is now qualified to interoperate with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 R2. IPL will be showcasing the entire LifeSize high definition video lineup and its interoperability at its Thought Leadership Conference in Sydney on 26th May, 2011. At the conference LifeSize will also be demonstrating the product’s seamless integration with Microsoft Lync.

Registering a staggering 84 percent increase in value over the past year, Apple has emerged as the most valuable brand in the world, ending the four-year reign of Google at the top of the table in the sixth annual BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands study.

The Australian online advertising market has continued its strong upward trend, with online advertising expenditure for the March quarter 2011 growing 17 percent year-on-year. The data, which was released today by IAB Australia in its Online Advertising Expenditure Report (OAER) compiled by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), showed online expenditure for the first three months of 2011 totalled $601 million - the largest ever Q1 recorded.

Nicole Kidman and Rebecca Gibney lead the list of Australia’s most powerful celebrity mums, in the celebrity + brand (Cebra) index.

Disappointing TIO complaint statistics released today point to the urgency of implementing a tougher new industry code that has been drafted by industry and consumer groups, Communications Alliance said today.

Seagate (NASDAQ: STX), the leader in hard drives and storage solutions, today unveiled the world’s first 3.5-inch hard drive featuring 1TB of storage capacity per disk platter, breaking the 1TB areal density barrier to help meet explosive worldwide demand for digital content storage in both the home and the office.

Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) today announced innovative new cloud-optimised networking solutions to enable the next evolution in public cloud infrastructures. These advancements will help service providers leverage their existing infrastructures to create a broad set of new revenue-generating services, such as virtual private cloud services, for enterprise customers. As a result, service providers around the globe can minimise their infrastructure expenditure and raise their revenue to increase profitability.

Brocade (Nasdaq: BRCD), the leader in fabric-based data centre architectures, today announced innovative solutions that will help enterprise customers migrate smoothly to private cloud architectures. The company is once again leading a fundamental transformation of the networking industry by introducing the world’s first fabric-based, end-to-end networking solutions based on industry-leading 16 gigabits per second (Gbps) Fibre Channel technologies.

Brocade (Nasdaq: BRCD) today introduced a new technology architecture that outlines the company’s vision and the technology investments it will make to help its customers evolve their data centres and IT resources and migrate them to the “Virtual Enterprise”.

Brocade (Nasdaq: BRCD), the leader in fabric-based data centre architectures with over 15 years of experience in building mission-critical networks for the most demanding IT environments in the world, will play host this week to customers and press as well as financial and industry analysts at the 10th annual Brocade Technology Day Summit. The event will be held at the new Brocade San Jose-based campus and data centre, which was recently awarded by Uptime Institute 2011 Green Enterprise IT for data centre design, consolidation and energy efficiency.

Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) Australia today released its final video advertising standard guidelines and best practices for Australia. The guidelines were issued by the IAB’s Standards and Guidelines Council following an extensive industry assessment and review process.

Dimension Data today announced it has completed the deployment of a federated wireless infrastructure upgrade for Deakin University. Known as ‘DeakinSecure’, the new network is designed to improve connectivity for the increasing number of students spending course time in remote health locations such as public hospitals.

IPL Communications, a strategic distribution partner in APAC of Media5 Corporation, today announced that Mediatrix 4400 VoIP Gateways have been certified as interoperable with Cisco® Unified Communications 320 (UC320) Series for Small Business.

Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) today announced that it will be hosting two Online Behavioural Advertising (OBA) forums for advertising and marketing professionals. The forums will be held in Sydney on Wednesday 4th May and Melbourne on 31st May, 2011.

This week’s announcement by Sony that it had discovered a ‘non-gaming' attack against its PlayStation Network servers, leading to the potential theft of the data of some 77 million users, sends a strong message to the business community: IT security risks are not theoretical, they are real, and they are realised all-too-regularly.