AMS aligns with portal provider

American Management Systems Inc., a government consulting firm, and Epicentric Inc., a portal provider, announced an alliance Tuesday in which AMS will tap Epicentric's solutions to serve federal clients.

AMS has adopted Epicentric's platform to create an enterprise portal solution for AMS' federal eBusiness suite of applications, and to enable agencies to unify their information technology environments and applications, said Gregg Mossburg, senior principal at AMS.

Epicentric's technology provides government agencies with a way to access commercial off-the-shelf applications through a single Web access point for all administrative needs.

"There's a demand in the market, and what they're looking for is an open, extensible platform to bring together all of their internal IT resources and investments," Mossburg said. "[They want] a single place to access everything to get their jobs done at an agency, and specifically for [AMS], access to applications in the federal eBusiness suite."

Using Epicentric's open modular architecture, agency workers can expand the use of AMS' new Momentum Enterprise Portal to leverage existing IT investments while creating a seamless enterprisewide IT environment, Mossburg said.

The two companies began discussing an alliance a "couple months ago," Mossburg said, and future plans include focusing on making appropriate information available to external users.

"Epicentric provides a technology platform [with] a single point of entry for internal users, but we want to move out to citizens and suppliers to interact more seamlessly over the Internet with those communities," he said.

AMS and Epicentric are hoping to announce the first government customer for the Momentum Enterprise Portal "sometime this quarter," Mossburg said.