Utilities ride on NT coattails
Every Microsoft Exchange Server license bought by the federal government is good news for NetIQ Corp. The 3-year-old Santa Clara, Calif., software developer sells its Microsoft BackOffice and Windows NT operations management software on the General Services Administration Information Technology Schedule. Because agencies in recent months have bought thousands of Microsoft Exchange Server licenses, NetIQ has in a relatively short time sold its NetIQ AppManager suite to some of the largest federal NT users, including the
TECH REFRESH
Federal enterprise switching infrastructures are getting faster and more sophisticated, judging by additions to two General Services Administration Information Technology Schedule contracts. Force 3 Inc. has put Cabletron Systems Inc. switching products on its GSA schedule. A five-slot SmartSwitch 6000 chassis goes for $2,018 with a removable fan tray and two slots for power supplies, which Force 3 of Crofton, Md., does not include.
She'll verify: 'We aren't missing anything
Name: Mary Powers-King Agency: Federal Aviation Administration Title: Deputy director, Year 2000 Program Length of service: 20 years Age: 47 Education: Bachelor's degree in liberal studies, Thomas Edison State College, Trenton, N.J.; numerous computer science and management courses at technical and academic institutions Responsibilities: Primary backup to the Year 2000 program director. Provide briefings on program status to internal FAA organizations and management and to airlines, industry and government. Help manage program office staff and activities. In conjunction
FAA deflects criticism about its contingency plans
The agency will spend $142.2 million in fiscal 1999, according to figures it submitted to the Office of Management and Budget last month. Both the air traffic controllers union and the Transportation Department inspector general have criticized the Federal Aviation Administration's plans for responding to possible computer-related service disruptions around Jan. 1, 2000.
Switch is on at NAVOCEANO
After many centuries on the seas, you might think the world's navies would have finished charting the oceans, but the job just keeps getting bigger. The Naval Oceanographic Office operates eight survey stations and gathers information from hundreds more remote sites around the world to track tides, temperatures and shifting shorelines.
1999: the year of computer security—maybe
What was hot in 1998? Security products. What will be hot in 1999? Security policies. Spending on network security worldwide this year will likely jump 53 percent from last year to $1.85 billion, according to DataQuest Inc. of San Jose, Calif. It is expected to grow to $2.98 billion next year and reach $5.18 billion by 2000.
HP lobbyist helped Capitol Hill define IT policies
Tisdale had been a lobbyist in Sacramento before coming to Washington. He was a skilled trade association hand, having worked for the Chamber of Commerce, the American Electronics Association and the Scientific Apparatus Makers Association before starting up Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Washington government relations office. Although HP now has $40 billion in annual sales, it was a much smaller company 14 years ago. The high-technology industry itself mattered a lot less to lawmakers then. Now lots of
PROFESSIONAL CALENDAR
4-8 MacWorld Expo Conference. San Francisco. Contact IDG Expo Management Co., P.O. Box 9127, Norwood, Mass. 02062; tel. 800-645-3976. 11-14 SpaceComm '98 Conference. Colorado Springs, Colo. Contact Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association, 4400 Fair Lakes Court, Fairfax, Va. 22033; tel. 719-554-1147. 14 DOD Growth Markets Conference. Falls Church, Va. Contact the Electronic Industries Alliance, P.O. Box 75023, Baltimore, Md. 21275; tel. 703-907-7571.
EPA lauds 12 workers for superior systems development, management
The Environmental Protection Agency and GCN honored 12 employees for excellence in systems development management and implementation. The EPA employees received their awards at a recent GCN Forum luncheon in Washington. Honored were:
IRS issues strategy to stimulate electronic tax filing
The IRS this month announced 45 initiatives to encourage taxpayers to file electronically. Congress this year mandated that by 2007 the IRS receive at least 80 percent of income tax returns electronically. A major barrier is cultural, said Robert Barr, assistant commissioner for electronic tax administration. The IRS has to make the public feel comfortable with electronic filing, he said. To do that, it will begin running television commercials promoting electronic filing.
Education names Woods its COO for aid
As the government's new education financial aid chieftain, Greg Woods will get the chance to implement the ideas and policies he championed as deputy director of Vice President Gore's National Partnership for Reinventing Government. The Education Department earlier this month named Woods as its chief operating officer for the Office of Student Financial Assistance, a performance-based organization.
FTS users left hanging as AT&T scraps X.25
Come June, AT&T Corp.'s FTS 2000 Network A users will no longer be able to buy X.25 service. AT&T's imminent withdrawal from the X.25 market, coming at the height of year 2000 preparations, will force agencies on Network A to migrate to frame relay service from AT&T or to find other network providers that offer X.25 service.
First FTS 2001 award goes to Sprint | Breaking News
The General Services Administration on Dec. 18 awarded the first-round FTS 2001 contract for long-distance telecommunications services to Sprint Corp. The eight-year contract guarantees Sprint at least $750 million in revenue. A second round of bidding for a second FTS 2001 contract was set to begin immediately, and that award could come by mid-January, said Dennis J. Fischer, commissioner of GSA's Federal Technology Service, which will manage the contracts.
Software training is on course
A distance-learning initiative has cut the Education Department's training expenses by nearly 4,000 percent, an agency official said. Costs have dropped from about $200 per course to just $5.20, said Steven Corey-Bey, director of the Special Projects Group in the Office of the Chief Information Officer. "Given the economies, what's not to love" about software training? he said.
A world that merges Netscape, AOL doesn't make for sweet dreams
Packet Rat R. Fink While visions of sugarplums dance in the heads of GCN readers, the Rat has been having a recurring nightmare. It starts off with the grating buzz of an alarm clock. The windows are covered by blackout curtains, but a glance at the clock reveals that it's 6 p.m. For some reason, it's time to go to work.
Database helps agency supply answers on date code progress
Federal Aviation Administration employees invited by the Transportation secretary to a listening session in September told the secretary that year 2000 oversight and reporting burdens had added to their stress in an already stressful job. Until as recently as July this year, the FAA maintained no centralized database of year 2000 system-readiness data, despite frequent calls for information from oversight officials in the General Accounting Office, the Office of Management and Budget, and the President's Council
Year 2000 program director has confidence in FAA's success
GCN last spoke with Ray Long, director of the Federal Aviation Administration's Year 2000 Program Office, in July when Congress and the General Accounting Office were hammering the agency for getting off to a slow start in its year 2000 work. Since then, FAA met the Office of Management and Budget's Sept. 30 renovation milestone, reporting that 99 percent of its mission-critical systems are year 2000-ready.
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
The article "PC managers seek the real deal on real-time clocks" [GCN, Nov. 23, Page 48] misleads your readers into thinking that they do not have Y2K-compliant systems and that the answer is to buy hardware fixes from referenced vendors, a point that Dell Computer Corp. strongly contests. In the article, I am accurately quoted in stating that new systems with real-time clocks "by themselves are not compliant." What is missing is the continuance of the
Policy for saving electronic records applies to PCs only, Justice asserts
In what appears to be a change of course, the Justice Department now adamantly contends that a disputed federal policy on saving electronic records applies only to PCs. The Justice Department and Public Citizen, a Washington public interest group, have been arguing the point in a series of letters to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
Advanced OCR system will capture Census 2000
The Census Bureau's Data Capture System 2000 will let the agency process more forms electronically than it did for the last decennial census, reducing data entry errors and personnel costs. Because the system uses an optical character recognition program running under Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 to capture data from scanned documents, the Census Bureau will need fewer part-time employees to key in data, bureau officials said.
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