<FONT SIZE=2>When city officials in Austin, Texas, decided to reduce pollution by allowing more city employees to telecommute, they found Expertcity Inc.'s GoToMyPC software enables employees to telecommute without the expense of upgrading the city's virtual private network. </FONT>
<FONT SIZE=2>Imagine this dilemma: You are standing in the desert, overlooking 10,000 tractor-trailer-sized containers packed with everything needed to carry out a military operation. Your mission: find a pair of size 10 boots locked away in one of those metal vessels. What do you do?</FONT>
While the Defense Department has undertaken the process of mapping its processes to an information architecture blueprint, its approach has been uneven, according to a General Accounting Office report.
The Department of Defense has relied more heavily on precision-guided weapons in recent conflicts and may do so more in future engagements, according to a report released by Northrop Grumman Corp.'s internal think tank.
Identity management software provider ActivCard has completed its transition from being a French company to a U.S. one, a move done in part to better serve the U.S. government.
<FONT SIZE=2>When the Marine Corps needed to carve fat from operating expenses at its bases, it turned to cutting-edge accounting software from SAS Institute Inc.</FONT>
William Shafley overlooked row after row of empty workstations stretching across a snazzy 43,000-square-foot call center in Reston, Va. In one corner of the sunlit building, a handful of employees were taking orders and making contacts with government customers. By the end of the year, Shafley wants to fill this office, leased in December by Micro Warehouse Gov/Ed Inc., with 300 government sales and support personnel.</FONT>
Raytheon Co. has put together a team of other defense, IT and communications heavyweights to pursue the next iteration of the Air Force's distributed common ground system, worth an estimated $161 million.
VeriSign Inc. will provide an agencywide public-key infrastructure service for a new smart-card personnel identification system being developed by the Bureau of Land Management.
ERG Transit Systems Inc., Balcatta, Australia, will install and operate a transit smart-card system for Washington, the company announced this week. Northrop Grumman Corp., Los Angeles, will act as a subcontractor for the $20 million deal.
<FONT SIZE=2>When teenagers drag racing in the street knocked out a power box to a Santa Clara County, Calif., adult education center early one evening last November, the school system's network manager was paged within minutes automatically. An Ion infrastructure security system noticed the outage and sent an alert. </FONT>
<FONT SIZE=2>The departments of Homeland Security and Defense aren't the only ones getting a boost in IT spending in President Bush's fiscal 2004 budget proposal. The Commerce Department, for example, will see its IT budget rise to a proposed $1.54 billion in 2004, a $175 million increase over the 2003 request, according to the Office of Management and Budget.</FONT>
