SPAWAR RAIDERS REPELLED. Rear Adm. John Gauss and his Spawar crew continue to try to raid key personnel from the Defense Information Systems Agency based on reports I picked up last week. The most recent raid for a key civilian official at DISA HQ failed, I'm told, leading to speculation that the S
SPAWAR RAIDERS REPELLED. Rear Adm. John Gauss and his Spawar crew continue to try to raid key personnel from the Defense Information Systems Agency based on reports I picked up last week. The most recent raid for a key civilian official at DISA HQ failed, I'm told, leading to speculation that the Spawar folks may resort to that old nautical tradition of press ganging. I'll be in San Diego this week and plan to check out whether they have started to fly the Jolly Roger from Spawar HQ in Old Town.
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DTS-P WANNA-BES. DISA just posted a list of companies eager to win all or a piece of the $4 billion extension of DISN into the Pacific. Sprint led the pack in the size of the teams fielded at the bidders conference this month with a five-person squad headed by federal pooh-bah Bill Brougham. MCI sent a four-person team, headed by the formidable Diana Gowen, while AT&T sent only one: former DISA DISN honcho Tony Cira. It's nice to see Cira making it off the bench, although I hear AT&T does not have much of a bench left.
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WANNA-BES TWO. Australia's Telstra— committed to priming on DTS-P— dispatched a New York-based rep, Markos Moya, while potential subs Korea Telcom, Japan's KDD and Singapore Telecom each dispatched two officials to the bidder's conference. The competing South Korean carrier, DACOM, flew in three reps to beautiful Scott Air Force Base, Ill., for the conference, and Cable and Wireless sent a manager from its Vienna (Virginia, that is) office. Because satellite service is essential to meeting the DTS-P requirements, a number of satellite companies, including Hughes Global, Motorola Inc. and Loral-Orion, also showed up for the clambake.
Missing from this gathering were any reps from Teledesic, the planned "Internet-in-the-sky" venture backed by Bill Gates and cell phone pioneer Craig McCaw. That's strange because even though Teledesic has yet to launch a satellite, the wideband capabilities promised by Teledesic have started to creep into Pentagon briefing charts.
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WOOING YOU. My Alexandria, Va., antenna site has picked up strong signals that the Army's premier computer acquisition outfit, Cecom Acquisition Center-
Washington (once famed for its moniker CAC-WOO, until it dropped the OOs from its name) wants to find one good person as a leader. Interested? Call Dave Borland, the Army deputy DISC4 and a former director of CAC-W when it was known as ISSAA, and tell him the Interceptor sent you. Do well in the CAC-W job and you might end up helping another director, Kevin Carroll, figure out how to use BPAs to buy tank retrievers at the Army Materiel Command.
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REALITY CHECK. That's what vendors need if they want to grab any business in the flat-but-still-healthy $29 billion-a-year federal IT market, according to Mike Kush, head of market research for Electronic Data Systems Corp. Kush, wearing his Electronic Industries Alliance hat last week, said a survey of federal agency IT buyers shows they want real solutions, "not DreamWare.... That only works at the [Washington] Convention Center.''
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Y2K QUOTE OF THE WEEK. Sara DeCarlo, marketing honcho for Bell Atlantic Federal, also wearing her EIA hat, summed up one high-ranking Navy official's view of the effect that the Year 2000 will have on programs. She said the Navy official viewed it as "a sea anchor."
NEXT STORY: Ready for battle