DataStream

Cisco Systems Inc. and Lucent Technologies Inc. took big strides last week to bolster their services offerings.

Lucent did it the old-fashioned way by spending $3.7 billion Aug. 10 to buy International Network Services Inc., a Sunnyvale, Calif., network consulting company. INS has 2,200 consultants who specialize in designing and implementing large, complex networks.

Lucent spokeswoman Mary Ward said there will be benefits for Lucent's government customers even though INS is primarily commercial. "Clearly, this gives us more resources to plan and design large networks," she said.

Meanwhile, networking giant Cisco said Aug. 9 that it will invest $1 billion in KPMG.

"We chose to make an investment in KPMG's consulting business because KPMG understands how the Internet will reshape the future of all businesses," said John Chambers, Cisco president and chief executive.

Company executives expect to receive the government's go-ahead and close the deal in September. KPMG will then form KPMG Consulting, a separate unit. Cisco will have seats on the unit's board of directors.
CACI International Inc. was preparing to announce the departure of its second high-ranking executive in less than a year at press time.

Ronald Ross, who has served as president and chief operating officer since 1997, was reportedly set to retire from the Arlington, Va.-based systems integrator.

In January, CACI's Chief Financial Officer James Allen left to join GRC International Inc. of Vienna, Va.

Sources said Ross and CACI Chairman and Chief Executive Jack London clashed because of differing business styles. "They are very different people," a source said.

CACI spokeswoman Jody Brown declined to comment.
EMC Corp., Hopkinton, Mass., will pick up a nice chunk of government business through its $1.1 billion purchase of competitor Data General Corp., Westborough, Mass.
Ray Thomas, Data General's vice president of corporate marketing, said EMC will assume about $50 million in government business. Some of Data General's more notable business is with the Department of Defense, where it has installed a significant number of Microsoft Exchange systems for e-mail, he said.

Michael Ruettgers, EMC president and chief executive officer, said Data General's products have proven technology leadership in the midrange storage market, particularly in the Windows NT and Unix environment, but "have lacked the global distribution and support needed to achieve their full market potential."

EMC, which reported 1998 revenue of $3.74 billion, up from $2.94 billion a year earlier, is the market leader in enterprise storage systems, software networks and services. Data General reported 1998 revenue of $1.46 billion.

The acquisition is expected to be wrapped up by year's end.
GRC International Inc., Vienna, Va., acquired Management Consulting & Research Inc., McLean, Va., in a deal worth about $27 million.

MCR brings complementary skills that GRC can apply to its clients, and direct access to a new set of clients for technical services, said Gary Denman, GRC president and chief executive.

GRC expects to retain MCR's management team, employees and facilities and operate it as a wholly owned subsidiary. MCR, which provides cost analysis, financial management and program management to federal government customers, has annual revenue of about $30 million.

Jim Allen, GRC's chief financial officer, said his company is targeting revenue of $260 million for fiscal 2001. In 1998, GRC posted revenue of $131 million, up from $118 million the previous year.

With this acquisition, "we are at almost $190 million," said Allen, who expects GRC to add more companies to its shopping cart.
Duke University researchers developed a system for Internet communications at speeds higher than 1 gigabit per second using a special high-speed Myrinet LAN operating at the school's computer science department. The system doubles the current speed at which data can be transferred over the fastest LANs with TCP/IP.

The system was supplied by Myricom Inc. of Arcadia, Calif., as part of an experimental project funded by the National Science Foundation to develop new techniques for high-speed communications.

By using the latest newly released Myrinet network cards together with their own modifications, the Duke team achieved speeds of 1.147 billion bits a second by mid-May.

It marked the first demonstration on public record of TCP/IP running faster than a gigabit per second, end-to-end, one host to another.
The Automated Export System, a joint venture of the Census Bureau and the Customs Service, will go live by Oct. 1, allowing businesses to file export information at no cost over the Internet.

The system will let exporters, freight forwarders and consolidators file shippers' export-declaration information online.

The new system should reduce the paperwork burden on the trade community, make document storage and handling less costly, improve the quality of export statistics and facilitate exporting in general, government officials said.

Flagship Customs Services, Silver Spring, Md., received a five-year, multimillion-dollar contract to design and operate the system.
The National Science Foundation and the National Partnership for Advanced Computational Infrastructure brought more than 50 Houston area teachers to the fifth annual GirlTECH computational science training program at Rice University's Center for Research on Parallel Computation.

The goal was to raise the teachers' professional level in computational sciences and instill innovative teaching practices to encourage girls and minorities to pursue computing.

The educators received training in using online resources for research, teaching and collaboration. They created their own homepages, designed and published Web-based math and science lessons and created homepages for their schools.