* Paige to stay? Despite an announcement earlier this year that he planned to pull the pin after the election ASD/C3I Emmett Paige Jr. appears to have no immediate plans to hit the road. In a recent allcaps email (fondly referred to around here as Emmettgrams) Paige wrote 'I HAVE NO SET SCHEDULE
* Paige to stay? Despite an announcement earlier this year that he planned to pull the pin after the election ASD/C3I Emmett Paige Jr. appears to have no immediate plans to hit the road. In a recent all-caps e-mail (fondly referred to around here as Emmett-grams) Paige wrote "I HAVE NO SET SCHEDULE TO MEET AS TO WHEN I WILL DEPART OR EVEN AS TO WHEN I WILL SUBMIT MY RESIGNATION. I AM IN NO HURRY TO LEAVE OR PREPARED TO JUST PACK MY BAGS AND GO FOR A WALK. I AM STILL TAKING APPOINTMENTS ON MY CALENDAR FOR DECEMBER AND BEYOND."
* Lockheed Martin lock-on. Top Pentagon IT management definitely has Lockheed Martin in its sights. Following a public call by Paige for the company to make all of its IT systems - DMS SBIS GTN GCSS-AF CTAPS etc. - quickly compliant with the DOD COE DISA director Lt. Gen. Al Edmonds weighed in with equally strong language. "[Lockheed Martin] made a commitment to go with the COE.... If I were king for a day I wouldn't spend a dime until they show me a migration path to the COE " Edmonds told attendees at a recent GAO Technical Conference.
* DMS dates. Tom Clarke the DISA DMS program manager still is reluctant to put any hard and fast dates on the multiple steps to test and field the multibillion-dollar X.400/.500 messaging system. But he recently unveiled a time line that he called a "plan not a schedule." This calls for the DMC unclassified DMS components to go through an Initial Operational Capability review in early December.
"We have had great difficulty in making our COTS dream come true...to make all these products interoperate.... This is more of a challenge than we anticipated " Clarke said. He added that DISA will not know until the end of November if it can meet the target dates. Despite these caveats Clarke said he expects that "we're still shooting for Dec. 31 1999 " to have DMS replace Autodin.
* Hot software. Clarke said Lockheed Martin the DMS contractor has already sold 134 000 packages of user agent software from Lotus Microsoft and ERSL with about half those packages full DMS versions and the other half commercial packages upgradable to the DMS version at a nominal cost.
* Hot PC-2 deals. Although the Army hasn't released pricing yet for the PC-2 contracts the Interceptor is picking up strong signals that Syso-rex will offer a Cyrix P200 for $1 100. At that price I would love to do my Christmas shopping from the Sysorex PC-2 catalog.
* HITS for Christmas. My Courthouse Road antenna site has picked up strong signals that DISA plans to award the Hawaii HITS contract - pursued by GTE and an AT&T/US West/Oceanic Cablevision partnership - just before Christmas.
* Aloha. The Interceptor will have his mobile unit in Honolulu for the AFCEA Asia-Pacific Conference Nov. 12-14 and then will redeploy to La Jolla Calif. for the semi-annual Army Small Computer confab Nov. 18-21.