CHANNEL NEWS

SAP Public Services Inc., a subsidiary of SAP America Inc. of Newtown Square, Pa., is providing the Army Tank-Automotive and Armaments Command armament research, development and engineering center with portal software that provides users with a single point of access to critical information.

"We will need this new environment when we look down the road and address our ability to perform at high levels as a smaller, leaner Army," said George Albinson, the enterprise resource planning program manager for the research center.

The software will be used to replace aging, internally developed applications. The initiative advances the center toward a totally integrated data environment.

The center is the first SAP Public Services customer to implement the portal solution, called mySAP Enterprise Collaboration Portal.GTSI Corp. of Chantilly, Va., earned Cisco Gold status, the highest certification that network equipment manufacturer Cisco Systems Inc. of San Jose, Calif., bestows on its partners.

GTSI has met the Cisco requirements on positioning, selling, installing and supporting Cisco solutions, making the company one of only two government-focused product and solution providers that Cisco has conferred this status.

"These important certifications reinforce GTSI's ability to meet the needs of our customers worldwide. The work we perform for the federal government is extremely important, and we continually invest in our staff to ensure that we can provide the best Cisco support available," said Jim Dunn, GTSI's vice president of technology solutions.

GTSI carries a full line of Cisco products on its GSA schedule and government contracts. It also provides professional services through a 15-member Cisco technology team. NAI Labs, a division of the network security and management software company Network Associates Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., was awarded a $1.2 million contract by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop security extensions to the open-source FreeBSD operating system for use by the Navy's Space and Warfare Systems Command.

The FreeBSD operating system is widely used by Internet service providers and in network products such as routers and firewalls.

According to NAI, an increasing number of military systems rely on FreeBSD to power network infrastructure, network services, file and database servers and workstation environments.

NAI, in cooperation with a number of independent FreeBSD developers, will enhance the operating system to offer advanced security features required in high-security environments, including mandatory access control, integrated file system and device extensibility services, network stack hardening and kernel security.