SAMPLE CLIENT COVERAGE

Aquilent Onboard to Upgrade Transportation Website - by David Hubler

Date: October 9, 2009
Client: Aquilent
Summary: Aquilent Inc. will support the Transportation Department’s main Web site with a comprehensive set of Web and content management system solutions. The four-year contract is valued at more than $4 million.

The award specifically calls for Aquilent to assist DOT.com with Web design and development including requirements analysis, information architecture, usability testing, visual design and branding.

Aquilent wins $4M DOT.gov contract

Date: October 5, 2009
Client: Aquilent
Summary: Web technologies company Aquilent has won a $4 million contract from the Department of Transportation to support the agency’s DOT.gov site.

The contract brings Aquilent’s new contract wins to $13 million for its fourth quarter of 2009.

Under terms of the contract Laurel-based Aquilent will provide Web site design and development, including related analysis, information architecture, testing and branding.

Movers & Shakers

Date: September 14, 2009
Client: Parabon
Summary: Lance F. Howden was appointed director of federal sales at Parabon Computation Inc., a Reston provider of extreme-scale grid computing software and services. Mr. Howden will lead Parabon's government-sales and business-development initiatives. For the past four years, Mr. Howden worked for Teradata Corp., where he was senior account manager for clients in intelligence.

Briefly Noted

Date: August 13, 2009
Client: Parabon
Summary: Reston-based Parabon Computation, a developer of grid computing software and services, has named Lance Howden as its director of federal sales. Howden most recently served as a senior account manager at Teradata, and previously spent time at Endeca Technologies and Oracle.

Cloud Storage Needs a Hybrid - by George Crump

Date: August 4, 2009
Client: DS3 DataVaulting
Summary: Cloud storage is ideal for small businesses to perform backups, archive important data and to share files when collaborating on a project. Small businesses are typically built on desktops and laptops making the cloud the ideal connection point. As the business grows and servers are added, applications become more critical and the cloud becomes the bottleneck. At this point to handle the needs of a growing business cloud storage needs a hybrid.

Cloud backup companies like Axcient or DS3 DataVaulting leverage this hybrid architecture to allow for cached local backups before replicating them to the cloud, but more importantly they use these appliances to provide local recovery of data in the event of a failed system. Recovering a single file through the cloud is not a major problem, recovering an entire server can be impossible, having this appliance local provides a scalable solution for the growing business.

National Science Foundation gives Parabon NanoLabs $100K grant - by Tierney Plumb

Date: July 21, 2009
Client: Parabon
Summary: Parabon NanoLabs has won a National Science Foundation grant to develop novel cancer therapeutics using DNA nanotechnology fabrication and grid computing sequence optimization.

The Reston-based subsidiary of Parabon Computation Inc. will use the $100,000 grant to fund pre-clinical experiments that demonstrate the viability of a new class of anticancer molecules that are engineered to automatically self-assemble from interlocking strands of synthetic DNA.

Why Feds Can't Stop CyberAttacks - by Gregg Carlstrom

Date: July 13, 2009
Client: Aquilent
Summary: Cyberattacks targeting dozens of government and business Web sites last week were “primitive” and “just a nuisance,” not very different from the attacks that target federal systems on a daily basis, experts say — but they still caught the federal government by surprise.

The hackers used what’s called a distributed denial-of-service attack: An attacker takes control of a network of computers, usually spread around the world — a “botnet” — and uses them to send millions or billions of requests to a Web server. If the server can’t handle the traffic or block the malicious requests, it will overload and shut down.

“For the most part, a more modern infrastructure is an almost complete protection against these attacks,” said Mark Pietrasanta, the chief technology officer at Aquilent, a Maryland-based IT firm that does Web development for numerous federal agencies. “And we know a couple of the agencies [that were affected] do not have real modern infrastructure for their Web sites. It’s analogous to running a Web site on a computer under someone’s desk.”

New Version of Parabon Crush Software Enables Deep Analytics on Challenging Datasets

Date: June 23, 2009
Client: Parabon
Summary: Parabon Computation, a provider of extreme-scale grid computing software and services, has announced the latest release of Parabon Crush, a massively scalable, statistical data mining and predictive modeling application that draws its power from Parabon's Frontier Grid Platform. Now enhanced with a search algorithm developed for NASA, Crush uses the idle capacity of thousands of computers on a Frontier Grid to discover optimal statistical models within high-dimensional datasets that are too computationally challenging for traditional approaches.

Managed Services Gets Top Honors with City of Clemson, SC - by Alexias Anderson

Date: May 21, 2009
Client: DS3 DataVaulting
Summary: As IT manager for the city of Clemson, I am tasked with making sure that the technology driving our city’s operations is well-maintained and in line with our continued vision of growth and development. An important part of that is the ability to ensure business continuity and to know that critical data is fully protected and recoverable, even during unplanned outages and disasters.

We found what we were looking for through a managed services delivery model that gives us an affordable web-based continuity and recovery solution that doesn’t require any additional IT resources on our end. The solution was delivered through a service team that included Synnex as the distributor, DS3 DataVaulting as the managed services solution provider, and Integral Solutions Group/Digital DNS as the local implementer. With this approach, we had the opportunity to implement a very efficient and secure strategy while being able to manage other things more effectively as well. The learning curve was also very short and easy.

Parabon Preps Companies for DDoS Attacks - by Kara Reeder

Date: May 5, 2009
Client: Parabon
Summary: Parabon Computation hopes to help companies better prepare for distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks by offering an online service that simulates a full-fledged DDoS attack on their networks.

According to Computerworld, Blitz Distributed Testing Service uses anywhere between 5,000 and 10,000 computers on Parabon's online computing grid to generate DDoS attacks on demand against specified targets.

Parabon Launches Grid-Based DDoS Attack Tests - by Jaikumar Vijayan

Date: May 4, 2009
Client: Parabon
Summary: Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks of the kind that crippled networks in Estonia two years ago are hard to defend against because they typically involve thousands of compromised computers knocking a Web site or server offline by simultaneously sending it torrents of useless traffic.

A new online service introduced last week by grid computing vendor Parabon Computation Inc. aims to help companies better prepare for such attacks by giving them a way to simulate a full-fledged DDoS attack on their networks.

The service allows companies to test their networks against DDoS attacks at scales comparable to a full-on cyberattack, according to Steve Armentrout, president and CEO of Parabon. Currently, the company can harness anywhere between 5,000 and 10,000 computers on its grid to generate targeted network traffic against a site or server, Armentrout said.

Government 2.0 and the Channel - by Michael Vizard

Date: April 20, 2009
Client: Aquilent
Summary: With the election of the most technology-savvy president in history, the government sector has quickly become one of the most exciting places to work if you’re a solution provider.

Aquilent, for example, is a solution provider based in Laurel, Md., that is working with hosting provider Terremark and content delivery network provider Akamai to deploy USA.gov on a cloud infrastructure. The movement of USA.gov to a set of cloud services managed by Terremark will save the government millions of dollars on IT infrastructure spending while create a more streamlined infrastructure environment for Aquilent to deliver additional services.

According to Aquilent CEO David Fout, the federal government is in the process of lining up IT initiatives around three core themes set by the president: transparency, collaboration and participation. To that end, spending attached to stimulus spending now has a lot more compliance requirements attached to it and there is a lot more interest these days in cross-agency IT projects that foster collaboration. Finally, the USA.gov portal is being upgraded with a variety of Web 2.0 technologies designed to make it easier for citizens to share information and opinions with government entities.

Parabon preps for cyber assault - by Aharon Etengoff

Date: April 20, 2009
Client: Parabon
Summary: Parabon Computation has introduced a new testing service designed to help secure government and corporate networks against cyber attacks.

The company plans its first public demonstration of Blitz in Anaheim this week at the Department of Defense (DoD) Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Customer Partnership Conference, where it will conduct live fire denial-of-service exercises.

"There's a lot of talk about the importance of cyber security, but few realize the degree to which many important government network services are vulnerable to cyber attack. The DISA Conference is a fitting venue for a white-hat wakeup call," explained Parabon CEO Dr. Steven Armentrout.

Business Notes

Date: April 15, 2009
Client: Connectiv Solutions
Summary: Bethesda business Connectiv Solutions, the market leader in enabling telecom operators to uncover valuable network intelligence for measurable competitive advantage, recently announced the appointment of David Knutson as executive vice president, corporate development and strategy. Knutson brings significant industry knowledge and experience to help further strengthen Connectiv's ability to deliver valuable business intelligence that is driving millions in savings for the telecommunications sector. .

Connectiv Solutions plugs in strategy chief - by Suzanne Stevens

Date: April 2, 2009
Client: Connectiv Solutions
Summary: Connectiv Solutions Inc. is one of those rare corporations that's thriving in this brutal economy. The firm, which helps its telecommunications clients track and manage data, increased its staff by 70% last year and moved into a new headquarter building in Bethesda, Md., that tripled its office space. Now, Connectiv has hired a new dealmaker to help expand the customer base.

David Knutson has joined the firm as executive vice president of corporate development and strategy. A telecom and wireless industry veteran, he has held executive and development positions at Cyren Call Communications, Wireless Facilities Inc. and TeleCorp PCS.

Is Your Information Really Safe? - by Ericka Chickowski

Date: March 20, 2009
Client: BWise
Summary: As more organizations realize that using perimeter and anti-virus technologies alone is like locking their doors but leaving their windows open, it’s become evident that enterprises must upgrade their security practices in order to prevent huge data breaches like the one announced by Heartland Payment Systems this past January.

First and foremost, your enterprise should approach the security problem with a comprehensive risk-management strategy that prioritizes information based on its importance to your organization and on regulatory requirements that necessitate its protection. This prioritization should then inform your company’s decisions about where IT security will concentrate its efforts.  

“It falls on management and the IT department to ensure that there are comprehensive security measures in place and that an internal audit will validate the assumptions of the controls,” says Josh Golden, director of internal audit for Kulicke & Soffa Industries, a Fort Washington, Pa.-based semiconductor manufacturer that uses the BWise Enterprise GRC platform to aid internal auditors in this process. “Having a software application that is going to assist in the testing protocols is a tremendous help. It’s really a give and take that needs to take place—and is taking place within Kulicke & Soffa—to optimize how we go about complying with a regulation. In addition, we want to translate that into value for the investors and management.”

The Language of Risk - by Rebecca Sausner

Date: March, 2009
Client: BWise
Summary: There’s little question the financial industry needs a way to accurately gauge, predict and price operational, market, credit and even systemic risk, for regulatory and institutional use and for the accurate pricing of assets and insurance products like CDS.

The challenge to the effort may be in bringing two distinct constituencies together on the issue. Heads of operational risk management may be all in favor of this initiative, but the nitty-gritty of defining a taxonomy via XBRL may well be a more technical task for the IT department. "I think it's a good solution for a problem the [line of business leaders] don't know exists yet," says Luc Brandts, founder and CTO of enterprise GRC vendor BWise.

Making the Most of ERP Systems for IT Control - by Caron Carlson

Date: February 10, 2009
Client: BWise
Summary: Enterprise resource planning software is designed to reach into all corners of an organization and integrate the data throughout the whole company. But when it comes to compliance, cracks remain.

Kulicke & Soffa, a maker of equipment for producing semiconductors, considered a GRC management module from Oracle, its ERP vendor. Seeking to document all of its key controls, both IT-related and business process-related, the company instead decided to deploy specialized GRC software from BWise Inc.

“Having [compliance tools] integrated with our ERP is potentially a great idea, but we wanted something that is going to best-in-class today,” says Joshua Golden, director of internal audit at Kulicke & Soffa. “We felt that integrating the data wasn’t as important as having a best-in-class system. BWise’s core competence is GRC.”  

Parabon Computation puts idle processing power to work - by Allan Maurer

Date: January 21, 2009
Client: Parabon
Summary: Making designer molecules from strands of DNA has the potential to help change drug discovery into drug design, but until recently, the computational requirements were daunting. Parabon Computation’s Frontier Grid platform, which puts the idle cycles of thousands of computers to work, can change that, says CEO and founder Steve Armentrout.

The company sells high performance computing as a service. “The software can be deployed across any platform and takes advantage of an organization’s existing capacity,” says Armentrout. That’s a factor he thinks will help the company make sales in this down economy, as companies look for ways to leverage resources already in house.

Parabon Serves Up HPC Cycles - by John West

Date: January 15, 2009
Client: Parabon
Summary: Reston, Va.-based Parabon Computation started out of CEO Steve Armentrout's frustration at the limited amount of HPC resources available to him as a researcher. In 1999, the same year that SETI@Home was released to the public and everyone was talking about grid computing, Armentrout started Parabon in an effort to provide the infrastructure to utilize previously idle computer cycles. Parabon -- along with companies of that era such as United Devices (now Univa UD), Entropia, Process Tree, and others -- offered users an opportunity to contribute their cycles to cancer research (an effort it still supports), and enticed volunteers to donate their idle cycles with monthly sweepstakes.

In spite of economic challenges, government contractors remain optimistic

Date: January 11, 2009
Client: Aquilent
Summary: While the American economy is having a difficult time—just look at Detroit—that doesn’t necessarily translate into a dire situation for government technology contractors.

David Fout, president and CEO of Aquilent, agrees with Nicoll that the quality of those seeking tech jobs is impressive. “More recently we have seen a pretty significant increase to the number of active job seekers looking for overhead roles, such as business development or human resources,” he notes. “It appears that companies are reducing fixed costs through reorganization, downsizing and eliminating overhead roles.

A Defining Moment - by John Edwards

Stung by charges that customers never saw risks coming, vendors of governance, risk, and compliance software are rebuilding their image.

Date: January 1, 2009
Client: BWise
Summary: Like the global economy, the governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) software business has experienced plenty of recent turmoil. Unlike the economy, however, the GRC world is used to it. Almost from the beginning, uniting governance, risk, and compliance into a single entity has been a delicate exercise. It required vendors to offer customers working in different business sectors three related, but not always easily integrated, capabilities.

New York–based vendor BWise charges customers based on the number of users and the client's choice of modules. A cost-conscious customer can start small and add modules as needs arise, since the modules are built-in and can essentially be turned on or off at the flip of a switch — or remittance of a check. Like many other vendors, BWise also offers subscription-based pricing for their installed software and software-as-a-service model that allows customers to pay as they go. Implementations normally take from one to three months, depending on a project's complexity. BWise chief technology officer Luc Brandts also stresses a fairly short-term ROI (about one year).

That may sound daunting, but market forces will provide some relief. The rapid proliferation of GRC vendors — Rasmussen now counts around 1,300 GRC technology and consulting service providers, from major players like Oracle, SAP, BWise, and OpenPages to single-owner start-ups — is about to give way to the same wave of consolidation that has swept through the business-intelligence market in the past two years.