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.
Microsoft pushes latest version of SQL as capable of ousting Oracle in govt. market
Microsoft Corp.'s SQL Server 7.0, set for a Nov. 16 launch, will "hammer away at database support and administration costs" with the goal of replacing Oracle Corp. database software in the government market, said Chris Guziak, an account executive for Microsoft federal systems in Washington. The Oracle8i universal file system and database management system is due out next month. Just as Oracle throws more operating system functions into its DBMS, Microsoft plans to fight back with
IBM plans a price cut for OS/390 software products
"Our plan depends on higher volumes at competitive rates." IBM Corp. plans to cut prices for its OS/390 mainframe software products by more than 20 percent a year. The company's nine OS/390 pricing models will shrink to two as IBM moves away from traditional capacity pricing and adopts use pricing.
Administration uses a grassroots tack to boost year 2000 awareness
The administration is calling on the national field offices of federal agencies to mobilize small and mid-sized businesses to prepare for year 2000 computer failures. A National Y2K Action Week scheduled for later this month is the government's first nationwide effort to help communities avoid problems come 2000. "We've decided to give a full-court press to this effort," said Janet Abrams, executive director of the President's Council on Year 2000 Conversion. Council members are senior executives from
Army Corps sets IT strategy
The new architecture will show how to conduct more business online. In drafting a new computer and communications architecture for the 21st century, the Army Corps of Engineers is trying to avoid what Architecture 2000 project manager Laurens Kennedy called "the engineered solution." New generations of information technology are replacing earlier ones every 18 to 48 months, Kennedy said, and the days of drafting strictly technical architectures are over. "Not only is technology not
Leasing options offered for Aviion servers sold on the IT Schedule
Data General Corp. offers leasing options for all Aviion servers listed on its General Services Administration Information Technology Schedule contract. The AV 3700 and AV 3700R departmental servers each have four 400-MHz Pentium II Xeon processors. The AV 8600 enterprise server has up to eight 200-MHz Pentium Pros. All run Microsoft Windows NT. The largest Aviion, the AV 20000, has up to 32 200-MHz Pentium Pro processors running DG-UX.
Microsoft seeks certification for cryptographic module
Microsoft Corp. has submitted a cryptographic services module for federal certification as part of an ongoing drive to fit its Microsoft Windows NT into agency network environments. Certification under the Federal Information Processing Standard 140-1 Cryptographic Module Validation Program could be completed late this year, said Karan Khanna, Microsoft lead product manager on the Windows NT security team in Redmond, Wash.
Casahl software synchronizes, replicates databases
Its flagship product, Replic-Action for Lotus Notes, replicates data between Lotus Domino/Notes groupware and relational database management systems. The Replic-Action 5.1 release supports real-time event logging and remote administration from a Web browser. Several server replication and synchronization products for Microsoft Exchange groupware are new this year. Replic-Action Interchange complements Exchange's data synchronizing functions by doing cross-domain and field-level replication between Exchange servers.
New copyright bill a balancing act of protecting owner, user interests
The proposed Digital Millennium Copyright Act, now undergoing reconciliation by congressional committees, would make it illegal to break the protective technologies by which software companies and other copyright holders prevent copying of their works. The bill's purpose is to lay the groundwork for the technical means to protect copyrighted material.
Inprise says middleware tool eases updating of intranet, Internet apps
Inprise Corp., formerly Borland International Inc., has entered the transactional middleware market. The Scotts Valley, Calif., company's VisiBroker Integrated Transaction Service for Java and C++ clients and servers runs on top of SunSoft Solaris and Microsoft Windows NT operating systems. It is a key component of the enterprise application server that Inprise plans to deliver later this year.
Web-to-host application in Java saves steps for hosts
Reflection EnterView, a nearly 100 percent Java application, administers host-access applications centrally and avoids hands-on administration at each desktop system, said Scott Merrick, a market manager for WRQ Inc. of Seattle. "In supply-chain management, providing access to host applications for users both inside and outside [government] is becoming key," Merrick said. Administrators need no specialized knowledge of Java or the Hypertext Markup Language to use the Web-to-host application, he said.
Tool helps manage requirements when developing software
Anyone who knows how to use e-mail and Microsoft Word can define software requirements with a tool from Technology Builders Inc. of Atlanta, according to company president Nicholas Kavadellas. TBI's suite eventually will manage the entire development processes to ensure software quality, Kavadellas said. Caliber-Requirements Management is the first tool in the suite.
2000 work's an inside job
Agencies trying to cope with date code repair mainly are using their own staffs to make the fixes, leaving vendor year 2000 factories mostly idle. "The tsunami wave of requirements has not come," said Barry Robella, a vice president for strategic programs for Platinum Technology Inc. of Oakbrook Terrace, Ill. Although year 2000 service vendors have touted their black-box factories as accurate and efficient, they cannot yet cite a single federal success story. Vendors said they do
DFAS accounting goes online
Before long, desks at the Defense Finance and Accounting Service no longer will have stacks of greenbar "six-footer" reports indexed by yellow sticky notes. Paperless host printing is about to clean off the desktops at DFAS and, if all goes as expected, save the large accounting organization millions of dollars in printing and distribution costs.
Government users are among the first to buy Sun's mainframe-class Starfires
Sun Microsystems Inc. has reported selling more than 500 Ultra Enterprise Starfire systems since the first Starfire came out in March 1997. One government intelligence site alone bought about 20 Starfire systems, a Sun Microsystems Federal official said. The intelligence users snapped up the air-cooled Starfires for data centers as well as high-performance technical computing applications such as signal and image processing apps, said Joanne Heider of Sun Microsystems Federal's high-performance computing division.
Application service assurance suites have a multitude of tools for various networks
BMC Software Inc. of Houston coined the phrase "application service assurance" to position more than 160 utilities and other tools it now markets for mainframe and client-server networks. The products extend umbrella protection for availability, performance and recovery services at the network, hardware, operating system, database, middleware and application layers, company officials said.
Army Corps of Engineers keeps tabs on data use
The Army Corps of Engineers bills its districts for their CPU connect time and disk activity on data center servers. "We've got some big applications," said Sanda Smith, an Army computer specialist who maintains the resource utilization software. The corps customized a commercial accounting utility that prompts district employees for their district billing codes when they log on to the data center's Sun Microsystems Inc. servers, which run SunSoft Solaris 2.51.
Many PC apps with two-digit year codes are fine, consultant says
One year 2000 consultant has begun a public campaign to educate users about widespread misunderstandings of year 2000 readiness in desktop systems. LAN managers know that desktop hardware, operating systems and BIOSes could have year 2000 problems, but most users are unsure what to do about their desktop applications, said Allen Falcon, executive vice president of IST Development Inc. of Boston.
NASA scientists synthesize space station environment using 3-D collaboration
NASA's synthetic, multiuser collaboration environment for building the International Space Station drew attention at the Siggraph trade show in Orlando, Fla., last month. NASA engineers at Langley Research Center, Va., demonstrated crew rescue vehicle simulations with engineers at the John C. Stennis Space Center, Miss., using a real-time network- and application-independent modeling environment from Muse Technologies Inc. of Albuquerque, N.M.
Informix Software sees Linux going enterprisewide
Linux, the freeware operating system that has made it through a few federal doors, is starting to look much more commercial now that several leading application vendors have declared their support. "We believe there will be a wave of Linux moving into the enterprise," said Steve Lambright, senior server product marketing manager at Informix Software Inc.
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