BREAKING NEWS

The Defense Information Systems Agency last week awarded three separate Defense
Information Systems Network transmission services contracts worth a combined $600 million
to AT&T Government Markets of Washington, MCI WorldCom Inc. and Sprint Communications
Co.

Transmission services under the DISN Transmission Services-CONUS Extension contracts
include sub-T1 and other point-to-point services to all locations within the continental
U.S. not covered by the $5 billion DISN Transmission Services-CONUS contract awarded to
AT&T Corp. last year.

The new 10-year, fixed-price, indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity DTS-CE contract
is for three base years with seven one-year options.

Agriculture Department associate chief information officer Arnold Bresnick will retire
this summer after nearly 30 years of government service.

Bresnick is one of the founding members of the Information Technology Resources Board,
which formed in July 1996 to do peer assessments of mission-critical systems. Bresnick was
also involved with the Federal IT Acquisition Improvement Team, which predated ITRB.
Bresnick has been the ITRB chairman since 1997.

Agriculture CIO Anne F. Thomson Reed said Bresnick will be sorely missed at USDA, where
he has worked for nearly two years.

Before joining Agriculture, Bresnick served for more than nine years as the director of
technology and computing services for the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor
Statistics. He began his career in the aerospace engineering industry.

Exabyte Corp. has designed its Exabyte X200 Arrowhead Mammoth mixed-tape library
specifically for storage area networks.

Available this week, the Santa Barbara, Calif., company’s Arrowhead Mammoth stores
up to 8T. It has a dedicated Simple Network Management Protocol port and supports remote
management through a Java browser.

The throughput rate is 216 gigabytes per hour, or 60 megabytes/sec with data
compression. With the next generation of Mammoth-2 drives due in July, the library will
store 30T at a transfer rate of 300 megabytes/sec, compressed. The mixed-tape library is
$34,985 with 40 Exatape AME data cartridges and two Mammoth tape drives, or $97,920 with
200 cartridges and 10 tape drives.

Contact Exabyte at 800-774-7172.

The 500- and 550-MHz Pentium III Xeon processors released this month by Intel Corp. are
drop-in compatible with existing servers and workstations that have one or more Pentium II
Xeons.

The Xeons come with 512K, 1M or 2M of Level 2 cache. They will slot into Intel’s
forthcoming Profusion architecture for up to eight-way symmetric multiprocessing. The
cache communicates at the processor’s native rate; a 500-MHz Xeon has 500-MHz cache,
whereas the cache of a standard 500-MHz Pentium III runs at half that rate.

Four-way SMP server announcements that accompanied the new Xeon’s release include
the NetFrame 6200 and 9200 series from Micron Electronics Inc. of Nampa, Idaho, and Unisys
Corp.’s Aquanta ES5000 and ES2000 series. Workstations with the new 500-MHz chip
include Compaq Computer Corp.’s Professional Workstation SP700, priced from $4,023
with 128M of RAM and a 9.1G hard drive, and Hewlett-Packard Co.’s similarly
configured Kayak XU priced from $4,350.

After the protest period ended March 15, the Army gave the go-ahead to its PC-3
contractors to begin work on the service’s latest PC buys.

Following a 60-day start-up period, Government Technology Services Inc. of Chantilly,
Va., and IntelliSys Technology Corp. of Fairfax, Va., will begin accepting orders for
computers, printers and peripherals under the indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity
contract, which is open to all civilian and Defense Department agencies, said Lee Harvey,
division chief of the Communications-Electronics Command Acquisition
Center–Washington.

GTSI bid Hewlett-Packard Co. systems. IntelliSys plans to sell Compaq Computer Corp.
PCs [GCN, March 8, Page 3].

Even if both contractors take the full 60 days to launch the two-year requirements
contracts, Army buyers can until May 12 order from GTSI and Vanstar Government Systems
Inc. of Fairfax, Va., the service’s PC-2 vendors.

The Army manages its contracts through the Small Computer Program at Fort Monmouth,
N.J.

Contact Small Computer Program at 732-427-6791.

The Energy Department this month awarded a $26.7 million task order to Statistica Inc.
for systems services.

Statistica will integrate Web applications, network services and document management
for the Office of Information Management in Energy’s Environment, Safety and Health
Office, said John McElrath, executive vice president of Statistica.

The department awarded the three-year task order through Statistica’s General
Services Administration schedule contract.

The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of SI International Inc. of Vienna, Va. SI
International acquired Statistica in January of this year.

The Defense Department has chosen FTS 2001 contractor MCI WorldCom Inc. to provide
switched long-distance voice, calling card, toll-free and 900-number services.

Representatives of the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Command,
Control, Communications and Intelligence, the military services and the Defense
Information Systems Agency joined in making the selection, according to a DISA statement.

“DOD’s decision was based on a best-value assessment that obviously included
price but also placed a high value on the vendor’s level of transition support,”
said John Johnson, the department’s transition manager for FTS 2001.

“This was a tough decision between two outstanding service providers,” he
said, in reference to MCI WorldCom and Sprint Corp.

BOSTON—Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told the Internet Commerce Exposition
audience here last week that he will urge Congress to extend a moratorium on Internet
communications taxes for five years.

The Georgia Republican called such charges “taxes on the future.”

He said the U.S. government must articulate a strong vision for the Internet or see
other countries’ bad policies forced on it.

“Our vision should be a total immersion in information,” he said. “I
would like as rapidly as possible to have every house in America have a T1 line. That
should be our minimum goal.”

——Florence Olsen, Christopher J. Dorobek, Susan M. Menke, Bill Murray,
Frank Tiboni, and William Jackson.