FAA taps Sony monitors for STARS project
The Federal Aviation Administration has awarded a $60 million contract to Sony Corp. of America for monitors for its Standard Terminal Automation Replacement System. FAA will buy 2,199 Sony DDM-2800C monitors from the Park Ridge, N.J., company under the three-year contract, FAA contracting officer Patricia Green said. The 20-inch, high-resolution monitors will replace the monochrome screens that air traffic controllers now use.
Labor promotes online benefits
The Labor Department recently awarded grants to several states to develop ways to file unemployment claims online. For the past three years, Labor has given up to $500,000 to states that submit the best proposals for electronic filing systems. Labor in September gave $500,000 each to Iowa and Wisconsin, $458,600 to North Carolina, $399,553 to Wyoming and $157,612 to New Hampshire.
Federal stars shine at the 11th annual GCN banquet
Bedecked in black ties and flowing gowns, more than 1,000 federal information technology executives and vendors toasted one another at GCN's 11th annual Awards Banquet late last month. The event started with a meet-and-greet reception. Between dinner and the infamous dessert bar, though, the main event took place—recognition of excellence in the deployment of government IT.
Service readies RFP for $1 billion logistics systems modernization
After months of delay, the Army soon will release a $1 billion request for proposals for the modernization of its antiquated logistics systems. At stake are the jobs of more than 500 civilian employees at the Army's Industrial Logistics Support Center in Chambersburg, Pa., and its Logistics Systems Support Center in St. Louis. The centers support the service's logistics systems.
10 government organizations win awards for state-of-the-art systems
At the GCN Awards Banquet, 10 federal agencies won information technology excellence awards for their work on cutting-edge programs. The awards recognize team rather than individual accomplishments. Honored were:
GSA's Wohlleben decides to go private
After more than 25 years as a public-sector employee, Paul Wohlleben last week called his federal career history. Wohlleben, most recently the chief information officer for the General Services Administration's Public Buildings Service, took a job as director of information technology consultants for the Washington office of Grant Thorton LLP of Chicago.
NASA steps out on seat
With two orders totalling almost $175 million, NASA last month became the first agency to use one of the government's two new multiple-award seat management buys. NASA late last month awarded a $154.9 million task order under its Outsourcing the Desktop Initiative for NASA program to OAO Corp. of Greenbelt, Md. Earlier in the month, it awarded a $19.6 million ODIN order to RMS Information Systems Inc. of Vienna, Va.
Warehouse field gets crowded
James H. Goodnight is president and co-founder of SAS Institute Inc., the largest privately held software company in the world. Since 1976, practically every federal agency has found uses for the Cary, N.C., company's decision-support and data warehouse software. Goodnight said the SAS System has evolved out of a small statistical program for data analysis and forecasting by virtue of 30 years of refining and moving the product forward.
Primeon offers pretest audits it says can reduce costs of year 2000 testing
ISI Professional Services lists Primeon Inc.'s year 2000 audit service on its General Services Administration Information Technology Schedule contract. ISI, a Washington 8(a) vendor, holds a blanket purchasing agreement with the Navy. Primeon of Burlington, Mass., charges 17 cents per line of code to convert software applications. The company also can report on the quality of year 2000 fixes for up to 1 million lines of source code in as little as 10 working days, said
GSA can compete with IT's 'big boys'
Shereen G. Remez has served in her post as the chief information officer at the General Services Administration for less than a year, but she has quickly become involved in the government information technology community. She is active in the CIO Council and is co-chairwoman of its Capital Planning and IT Investment Committee.
Web site supplies tailor-made law data for business
The Labor Department practice of posting in-depth, customized information on its Web site is a model for other agencies to follow, Labor officials said. The public can examine issues in labor law at the Labor's Employment Laws Assistance for Workers and Small Businesses (ELAWS) site at http://www.dol.gov/elaws/ and get answers tailored to their situations by a series of questions.
Virtual private network products are the hot trend
ATLANTA—Virtual private networking over secured Internet connections was the hottest trend at last month's NetWorld+Interop trade show. At least 16 companies announced at least 24 VPN products. "Everybody here is selling some VPN product," said Dayton Semerjian, senior marketing director at Shiva Corp. of Bedford, Mass. Its three VPN announcements made the company attractive to Intel Corp., which announced an agreement to acquire Shiva last month.
Johnson, industry executive of the year, vows Lockheed will deliver on FAA pact
Arthur E. Johnson, GCN's 1998 industry executive of the year, is president and chief operating officer of the Lockheed Martin information and services sector, a division of Lockheed Martin Corp. In 1997, his sector earned $6.5 billion, partly from work on the Global Transportation Network for the U.S. Transportation Command and the Display System Replacement Program for the Federal Aviation Administration.
BREAKING NEWS
GSA's Federal Technology Service issued several amendments to the FTS 2001 request for proposals last month in response to comments by potential bidders. Final changes to bidder proposals were due last week. FTS expects to issue a request for best-and-final offers by the end of the month, and only price changes will be permitted in the final offers due Dec. 1.
IBM deals a card to connect PC, mainframe servers
The Escon cards work with several Netfinity servers. IBM Corp. this month delivered an Escon adapter to connect IBM Netfinity PC servers to IBM S/390 mainframe servers at rates of up to 200 megabytes/sec. Users pay about $12,500 for the high-speed, bi-directional connection, IBM officials said. The direct-connect Escon cards work with several Netfinity servers that IBM introduced in September. The high-end Netfinity 7000M10, a four-way, 400-MHz Pentium II Xeon system, runs Microsoft Windows NT
Workgroups, see the benefits of building your own Web site
Did the LAN administrator have a panic attack when your workgroup requested a Web site for leaving or retrieving messages remotely? If so, just consider the booming market in firewalls. Security breaches have plagued many administrators who linked their office networks to the Web or provided dial-up access for employees.
NSF will stop developing Mac versions of certain agencywide business applications
The National Science Foundation has become the second federal organization in recent months to announce that some of its business applications will no longer run on Apple Macintosh systems. But "people can keep their Macs if they want," said Fred Wendling, director of NSF's Division of Information Systems. After peaking at 12 percent a few years ago, Macs now number 7 percent of NSF's client base, Wendling said.
Base updates its training LAN
The Training and Education Center at McGhee-Tyson Air National Guard Base in Knoxville, Tenn., is a fairly new facility with an up-to-date fiber backbone. But by 1997, its distributed learning network had become woefully inadequate. A shared Ethernet ran the Vines network operating system from Banyan Systems Inc. of Westborough, Mass., connecting desktop 486 PCs with 8M of RAM each.
Cebrowski makes call for bottom-up IT
The federal government needs to take a more decentralized, bottom-up approach to information technology, according to Vice Adm. Arthur K. Cebrowski. Government takes a wholly integrated, control-oriented approach—something which many feel is generally inconsistent with the information age," he said last month in an acceptance speech at the GCN Awards Banquet in Washington.
PROFESSIONAL CALENDAR
18 Windows NT Security Conference. Langley, Va. Contact Federal Business Council Inc., 10810 Guilford Road, Suite 105, Annapolis Junction, Md. 20701; tel. 301-206-2940. 19-20 Multiple Award Contracting Conference. Washington. Contact Government Contracting Institute, Conference Department, 11300 Rockville Pike, Rockville, Md. 20852; tel. 800-260-1545. 20 Managing Change in Era of Uncertainty Symposium. Fairfax, Va. Contact American Management Systems Inc., 4050 Legato Road, Fairfax, Va. 22033; tel. 703-227-4246.
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