Thales Australia Launches Perth based Software Development Centre

Last night at the Martime Museum in Fremantle Thales Australia launched their Software Development Centre.  Over the last 12 months Thales Australia has emerged as a single entity bringing together a number of smaller companies into a single entity.  With strengths in both military and civil industries, Thales also boasts a large software development branch with approximately 150 developers based here in Perth.

Under their former banner, ADI, most of their development was reportedly C/C++ and Java.  Through discussions with a number of the local Thales Australia staff I understand that they are doing a substantial amount of work in C#/.NET.  This move necessarily increases the pressure on the market to deliver more .NET developers which unfortunately are a scarce commodity at the moment.  Thales joins a number of other large .NET employers such as UnisysWest, HBOS/BankWest, Change Corporation and Fujitsu to name but a few.

With such pressure on the local .NET industry it begs the question as to what the future holds - what's going to happen when there just aren't enough developers to go around?  We are already seeing this happen with a number of people moving jobs in the past month.  There is an increase in the number of developers preferring short term contracts to permanent employment - this adds considerable overhead to projects due to the time lost due to replacing staff as they churn.  It was a relief last night to hear the Minister for Energy, Resources, Industry and Enterprise, Franics Logan, talk about a recent meeting where it was agreed that all states in Australia would follow Victoria in rolling out an advertising campaign targetting high-school leavers.  This would encourage them into tertiary ICT courses which will help fuel the next generation of technology workers.