Readers of this column will know that every so often we hand out the "Fraynor Award for the most Technologically Embarrassed". This award is named after the chap whose technology failings resulted in a small fire that wiped out his business and a larger one that destroyed half of London.

Things have been quiet as late and no-one has achieved the requisite levels of red-faced embarrassment required to get nominated. However, these things are a bit like buses where you can wait for a bus for ages and then convoys of them arrive all at once.

I have a certain amount of sympathy for both the latest nominations as I.T. support is one of those jobs where it is only a matter of time before something will go pear-shaped. No matter how good you are the computer will always find a way to make you look like a right chump. The more experienced you happen to be simply means that you have a greater MTBE measure. MTBE is, of course, "mean time between embarrassments"  and is rather like MTBF (mean time between failure) except less terminal.

So the first nomination is that big behemoth Big Blue aka IBM who are responsible for the maintenance of the mainframe running all of Air New Zealand's operations such as check in, call centres and baggage tracking. A power failure followed by the failure of a backup generator in an IBM Data Centre effectively grounded Air New Zealand and the IBM response was describes as "Amateurish" and "Unacceptable" by the Air NZ CEO. Ho hum.

The second nomination goes to Hitachi Data Systems who, even by the Fraynor standards, really came up trumps. Their equipment is used by the Microsoft subsidiary "Danger" that provides cloud computing services to T-Mobile. These services include the storage of data such as photo's, emails, messages and so on for all the T-Mobile cell phone users that pay for the "Sidekick" option to prevent data loss. Hitachi, during routine maintenance, managed to bring down the service in such a way as to destroy not only the stored data but also the backup. Reports from Microsoft and T-Mobile are now saying that the data is irrecoverable which is almost unbelievable. Whatever happened to off-site backup archives and that sort of causes Microsoft a red-faced moment as they were in charge of the daily operations and T-Mobile must be embarrassed too.

No, the recipient for the Fraynor award must go to Hitachi Data Systems for their efforts. IBM and their dysfunctional backup generator only embarrassed themselves but HDS managed to embarrass themselves, Microsoft and T-Mobile while also damaging the concept of cloud computing!

Well done chaps!