Briefing Book
Final payment. On June 29, Defense Information Systems Agency officials made their final $13.1 million payment under the Netscape software site license they signed in October 1997, Betsy Flood, a DISA spokeswoman, said [GCN, July 26, Page 8].
On June 29, Defense Information Systems Agency officials made their final $13.1 million payment under the Netscape software site license they signed in October 1997, Betsy Flood, a DISA spokeswoman, said [GCN, July 26, Page 8].The Defense Department-wide license includes Netscape Communications Corp. client, server and public-key infrastructure items, said Vince Steckler, a vice president at Logicon Inc. of Herndon, Va. DISA and the Office of the Secretary of Defense paid $60 million through the multiyear site license to Logicon, which may have saved as much as 90 percent in software licensing, Steckler said. In a move that was sure to frustrate vendors, Army Communications'Electronics Command officials last month canceled the fourth and final contract line item number for the Army-Wide License Agreement, which was to cover host-based firewalls.'There weren't any offerers that met the minimum requirements,' said Kim Wentrcek, contract specialist at CECOM's Acquisition Center'Southeast Region at Fort Huachuca, Ariz. In late April and June, CECOM officials canceled the first three contract line item numbers for the Army-Wide License Agreement for firewalls and intrusion detection software.Phillip Loranger, division chief for the Army Information Assurance Office in the Directorate of Information Systems for Command, Control, Communications and Computers, had said it was difficult to find a vendor that could support the 17 operating systems used in the Army [GCN, June 14, Page 6].If Army officials try to issue a similar contract, they will probably hold an industry planning meeting to ensure they don't have a repeat of the Army-Wide License Agreement cancellation, Wentrcek said. With the price per million or billion floating-point operations per second of computer power decreasing, Navy officials are buying more supercomputers.The majority of the eight types of systems at the Naval Oceanographic Office's Major Shared Resource Center for High-Performance Computing at Stennis Space Center, Miss., are SGI units, said Terry Blanchard, deputy director. About $1.5 million can buy a 50- to 100-GFLOPS supercomputer, he said.Navy HPC officials have huge input/output and storage requirements, he said. The MSRC, one of four such DOD centers, uses the Defense Research Information Network to connect the supercomputers with up to 70 major sites. The maximum bandwidth is 155 Mbps, Blanchard said.
