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Jerry Edgerton, MCI WorldCom’s senior vice president of government markets, said
the company already has begun taking orders from USDA offices.

Agriculture chief information officer Anne F. Thomson Reed said that third-party
contractors will help with the transition, but that MCI WorldCom’s support for the
switchover was a factor in its selection over competing contractor Sprint Corp. “It
was a unanimous decision within the department,” Reed said.

Four NASA space centers will get assetOutlook from Provance Technologies of Gastineau,
Quebec, to help them keep track of their 25,000 desktop PCs.

OAO Corp. of Greenbelt, Md.—which is taking over PC operations at NASA’s
Kennedy, Johnson and Stennis space centers, and the Marshall Space Flight Center—will
deploy the asset management package enterprisewide.

AssetOutlook lets groups of users maintain their own asset repositories. The
application gives users a view of current systems and services information from multiple
organizational and network perspectives, said Gilles Lalonde, president and CEO of
Provance Technologies.

NASA in October awarded OAO a $154.9 million task order to run the four space
facilities’ PC operations under the agency’s Outsourcing the Desktop Initiative
for NASA [GCN, Nov. 9, 1998, Page 1].

Industry efforts to secure access to online data have produced a draft Authorization
Services Application Programming Interface. The Open Group Ltd. of Cambridge, Mass., a
nonprofit standards consortium, is promoting it.

Officials of Hewlett-Packard Co., which contributed rules and an entitlement model to
the draft standard, said industrywide adoption of an authorization API is essential as
government and private organizations open up their internal networks to suppliers and the
public. The new users must be restricted to authorized data and authorized transactions,
HP product manager Daniel Dorr said.

Hewlett-Packard’s contributions to the draft come from its Praesidium
Authorization Server, DomainGuard Access and DomainGuard Rules for the Web and
client-server networks, Dorr said.

The Secret Service is investigating whether a hacker attacked the White House’s
Web site.

The site had abnormally slow response times over the weekend of March 27 and 28,
prompting speculation that someone might have hacked it.

“We did have problems on the White House Web site over the weekend due to
increased volume,” White House spokesman Joe Lockhart said at his March 29 daily
press briefing. “The site was never down, but I know that there were a lot of people
trying to get in that could not because of the increased volume, and it was running very
slowly.”

Lockhart said he had no information to support reports of a breach of the White House
network, “but we have asked—because there have been some people making
claims—that the Secret Service investigate.”

Compaq co-developed the Profusion architecture with Intel Corp. for eight-way
processing under Microsoft Windows NT and Windows 2000, Novell NetWare and UnixWare from
Santa Cruz Operation Inc. of Santa Cruz, Calif.

One of the first Profusion servers, code-named Thunder, will have an internal capacity
for up to 21 Wide Ultra2 SCSI hot-plug drives. Compaq also plans an eight-way upgrade path
for current ProLiant 7000 owners.

Contact Compaq at 281-370-0670.

In what is being called the priciest software acquisition ever, Computer Associates
International Inc. plans to buy Platinum Technology Inc. of Oakbrook Terrace, Ill., for
$3.5 billion.

Michael B. Miller, a Computer Associates senior vice president, said he expects no
impact on federal sites that have either his company’s enterprise-level database and
management tools or Platinum’s data warehousing, decision support and other
specialized tools, such as the call center systems used by many agencies.

The CA-Unicenter TNG enterprise management framework, perhaps the most prominent of the
two companies’ products, late last year won certification for the Defense Information
Infrastructure’s Common Operating Environment under Microsoft Windows NT.

The acquisition is subject to antitrust approval by the Justice Department.

The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts and Intellectual Property last month
approved a bill that would eliminate the administration’s limits on exporting
encryption software.

The Security and Freedom through Encryption Act, HR 850, would eliminate all controls
on exporting encryption technology.

The main debate has focused on software used to scramble data to keep computer
communications such as e-mail, credit card numbers and other confidential data protected
as it travels over the Internet.

The government has maintained strict export restrictions on encryption technology,
arguing that terrorists and others might misuse the software.

The IRS closed a chapter in the history of long-drawn-out procurements by awarding a
final pair of requirements contracts for PCs, monitors, printers and software for the
Treasury Department’s 12 agencies.

Late last month, the IRS awarded two-year Treasury Department Acquisition 3 contracts
to Government Technology Services Inc. of Chantilly, Va., and Win Laboratories Ltd. of
Manassas, Va. Both companies were incumbents under the TDA indefinite-delivery,
indefinite-quantity contract program. Would-be TDA-3 vendors submitted their bids 13
months ago.

GTSI and Win Labs will compete with SMAC Data Systems of Gaithersburg, Md., which won a
small-business, set-aside contract under TDA-3 last month [GCN, March 15, Page 85].

The two vendors also will square off against blanket purchasing agreement vendors at
Treasury: ComTeq Federal Inc. of Rockville, Md., which resells products from Micron
Electronics Inc. of Nampa, Idaho, and IntelliSys Technology Corp. of Fairfax, Va., which
resells Dell Computer Corp. products.

Profusion connects five 100-MHz buses by a crossbar switch, permitting simultaneous
point-to-point access to processors, memory and input-output components, officials said.