Director Database Marketing (Herndon VA US)

Fri Sep 4 17:31:26 UTC 1998

At 16:33 04-09-98 GMT, William Allen Simpson wrote:

>Hey, now that you are at Cisco, rather than NSF, maybe you can tell us
>how a "competitive procurement" or "peer reviewed" panels could have
>possibly chosen a group with no Internet experience and only a single
>56Kbps line over the other bids from well-known, well-connected
>(bandwidth-wise) organizations?

Well, actually, they **had** experience: they'd been doing it (adequately)
for DISA for months.  And they were clever enough to have
reverse-engineered the raw data they got from SRI - who were under neither
contract, obligation, nor inclination to lend much help - and turn it into
a workable db.

And the whole operation was still pretty small beans then; the 56 kb/s link
may have lacked redundancy, but it was plenty of bandwidth at the time.

>Well-connected politically?

Actually, no.  Nobody'd ever heard of them, except in the DISA award
context.  Of the three awardees resulting from the NSF solicitation, NSI
was hands down the least known of the lot.  And yet, of the other two, one
crashed and burned and the second sputtered along never achieving the
greatness of which it was clearly capable.

-s