SAMPLE CLIENT COVERAGE

Appointments

Date: December 3, 2007
Client: Apptis
Summary: Apptis of Chantilly named Paul Leslie, former
president and chief executive of Apogen Technologies, president and chief operating officer.

Apptis Hires Industry Vet as President - by Erin Killian

Date: November 28, 2007
Client: Apptis
Summary: Apptis Inc. has recruited the chief executive and co-founder of Apogen Technologies to take over as its president and chief operating officer.

The Chantilly-based systems integrator said Wednesday Paul Leslie will oversee the company's services business.

Apptis Brings on Leslie as New President - by David Hubler

Date: November 28, 2007
Client: Apptis
Summary: Apptis Inc. has hired Paul Leslie as its new president and chief operating officer to oversee its services business.

Leslie is a 25-year federal services technology veteran who most recently was president and chief executive officer at Apogen Technologies Inc. McLean, Va.-based Apogen is a government information technology services and solutions provider focused primarily on homeland security and defense.

Finish job: Right the wrongs caused by stock-option quirk

Date: October 27, 2007
Client: Coalition for Tax Fairness
Summary: If someone walks into your house and takes money out of your pocketbook, you'd call the police to arrest the thief. It's stealing. When the government forces Americans to pay taxes on money they didn't earn, it's stealing too. Except it's called the alternative minimum tax - specifically the part of the law that targets incentive stock options.

Last year, Congress passed legislation that set up a formula to repay over five years those caught by the ISO-AMT. It repays 20 percent per year of the remaining tax overpayments - meaning at the end of five years, taxpayers are refunded only about 70 percent of what they paid in. The legislation also didn't address the interest and penalties the Internal Revenue Service was adding to the bill.

Action urged on alternative tax- by Dave DeWitt

Date: October 24, 2007
Client: Coalition for Tax Fairness
Summary: The alternative minimum tax, created to keep high-income taxpayers from using deductions and shelters to avoid taxes altogether, continues to command congressional attention because of the problems it is causing for middle income taxpayers.

A previous legislative effort to correct the problem allowed taxpayers to get a refund for amounts paid on incentive stock option alternative mini mum tax, but the payments spanned a series of years, did not wipe out the entire debt, and did not discharge all their responsibilities to pay interest and penalties on tax bills for alternative minimum tax.

K2M Launches Phase II of Cervical Plate System - by Walter Eisner

Date: October 16, 2007
Client: K2M
Summary: Responding to a growing market, K2M announced the Phase II launch of its PYRENEES™ Cervical Plate System this past week. The company said it had nearly doubled the number of sets available in the market since the initial launch last August.

K2M states that its plate system is marked by "its distinctive low profile and patented tifix Locking Technology," and features a 1.5 mm leading edge and lowprofile drill guides. The technology requires no additional locking mechanism and screw flexibility is up to 45 conical degrees. The company says that PYRENEES offers the combined benefits of multidirectional screw placement with a rigid plate. This design helps ensure that the screw will lock to the plate at increased angles.

Q&A: Eric Adolphe, Inventor, Entrepreneur and Technological Innovator, Wins Coveted Award - by Anne Keisman

Date: October 7, 2007
Client: Eric Adolphe
Summary: On Oct. 10 at a ceremony in Washington, D.C., Loudoun resident Eric Adolphe will be one of ten people presented with a Tibbetts Award, a prestigious honor bestowed upon the top technological innovators in the nation.

In addition to his business contributions, Adolphe has been a strong advocate for community service. Now, he is spearheading an effort to open a children's museum that focuses on math and science education. Loudoun and Fairfax are vying to be home to that project.

Aldophe lives in Beacon Hill with his wife, Eunja, and his four children: Jacob, 8, Benjamin, 6, Quentin, 4 and Jasmine, 2. 

On the Move - by David Berlin

Date: September 19, 2007
Client: Crossflo
Summary: Michael Berman has joined Crossflo Systems as senior vice president of sales and marketing. Berman previously worked as vice president and general manager for Bull Services, a France-based U.S. systems integrator.

Speaking the Same Language - by Alice Lipowicz

Date: September 17, 2007
Client: Crossflo
Summary: The Federal Communications Commission’s new national broadband network for public safety will enable first responders to share data throughout much of the country starting as soon as 2009. But the new pipeline probably won’t achieve its full potential until more standards and systems for such data exchanges are widely adopted, according to experts.

"Now that a single framework, NIEM, has been established, it will still take time for the domains, including emergency management, to vet the standard and make sure it works within their existing infrastructure,” said Michael Berman, vice president of sales and marketing at Crossflo Systems Inc., of San Diego.

Moving Beyond Compliance - by Michael Vizard

Date: September 11, 2007
Client: BWise
Summary: Many businesses are moving beyond compliance for compliance sake and implementing broad policy and procedure management to take control of corporate governance, explains Luc Brandts, founder and chief technology officer of Bwise, in this IT Link podcast.

Length: 00:18:51

Click here to listen to the podcast.

Razorsight: Learning to Love the Paper Trail Once Again? - by Stephen Swoyer

Date: August 20, 2007
Client: Razorsight
Summary: Egon Spengler—or Dr. Egon Spengler, of Ghostbusters fame—had it all wrong: print isn’t dead. More than 20 years after digital triumphalists first began touting the advent of a soon-and-inevitably-to-be-realized paperless society, paper—in a variety of different guises (including invoices, shipping manifests, records, checks, money orders, and cash itself)—is still with us.

In any case, paper is still too much with us, Razorsight officials say—and it isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. "I don’t think [paper is] ever going away entirely," says RazorSight CEO Charlie Thomas. "There is this general 30,000 foot view of the world where paper will become extinct. But it’s not going away anytime soon. I started off at IBM when I was an undergrad, in the early and mid-80’s, and we had just introduced the PC, and I remember sitting in seminars where they were saying paper would go away in a decade. That obviously didn’t happen."

NYC Office Hires Firm to Help Train Criminal Justice Workers - by John Moore

Date: August 8, 2007
Client: Crossflo
Summary: New York City tapped Crossflo Systems to train criminal justice workers on how to manage data in accordance with information-sharing standards.

Crossflo’s training is based on its life cycle methodology for developing Information Exchange Package Documentation. IEPD provides a data-sharing blueprint, defining what data will be shared and with whom it will be shared, said Winfield Wagner, director of integrated justice information systems at Crossflo.

New at the Top - Kathleen M. Moore - by Judith Mbuya

Date: July 23, 2007
Client: Razorsight
Summary: Kathy Moore, Razorsight's Chief Financial Officer, is featured in the "New at the Top" column. Ms. Moore talks about her education, career highlights and how she got to where she is today.

The Collector - by Dan O'Shea

Date: July 9, 2007
Client: Razorsight
Summary: Intercarrier compensation can get messy. We're not talking about the politics surrounding this sensitive issue, which get pretty messy in their own right, but the seemingly simple daily invoicing and payment processes involved when carriers buy network capacity from one another, or terminate traffic on one another's networks.

Charlie Thomas, CEO of Razorsight, a company that automates invoice management for service providers, said, “One of the largest expenses for carriers, even small carriers, is network usage costs. They all buy capacity from each other , or terminate traffic on each other's networks, and they have to manage all that back and forth.”

E-Billing: First Step Toward E-Business - by Mike Vizard

Eliminating paper bills can help provide a clearer overview of business processes, says Michael Vizard, Ziff Davis Media's editorial director.

Date: July 7, 2007
Client: Razorsight
Summary: For the better part of a decade, we've been hearing about the benefits of e-business. But when you look around the landscape, you have to wonder just how much e-business is really going on. Sure, almost everybody has some sort of enterprise resource planning (ERP) application installed, but very few of these systems do much more than automate some fundamental internal business operations such as accounting.

Automating the billing process can be just the beginning. Jon Clopton, director of network planning at Neutral Tandem, which provides telecommunications services, uses a software-as-a-service offering from Razorsight to gather business intelligence about the company's customers from data gathered in the billing process. A holistic view of billing data makes it easier for Neutral Tandem to identify its most profitable customers alongside those that wind up costing more to serve than they are worth.

Finally, the Party Can Start - by Beth Karlin

Date: July 2007
Client: BWise
Summary: It’s been five less than satisfying years that companies have had to live with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, but for the first time there is less fear and loathing and more hope that the new guidance from the SEC and Auditing Standard 5 could turn SOX into something that might actually be a positive for public companies—at least the bigger ones.

“Companies should be taking the SOX effort and viewing it in a wider business context,” says Luc Brandts, chief technology officer and founder of BWise Inc., a leading solutions provider in the developing GRC software market. “If you take that approach, you can comply with a number of regulations without spending millions on documentation and testing work.”

Fairfax-Based Razorsight Names Kathy Moore as CFO - by Paul Sherman

Date: June 20, 2007
Client: Razorsight
Summary: Razorsight, a Fairfax-based developer of web-based software that automates the manual process of receiving, validating and auditing invoices, on Wednesday named Kathy Moore as its CFO. Moore most recently served as the CFO of Innovectra, and previously held vice president roles at Wisor and Net2000 Communications. Razorsight's software captures data from electronic and paper invoices, contracts and other sources of information, then analyzes it.

Bringing it all Together - by David Essex

Date: May 28, 2007
Client: Crossflo
Summary: For decades, the Defense Department and intelligence agencies cultivated a garden of specialized technologies that shifted classified data — typically files, text chat and e-mail — across security classifications and network domains.

“We see it as a very, very good step,” said Michael Ryan, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Crossflo Systems, maker of DataExchange cross- domain middleware. “It’s more effective for usto be able to standardize on a smaller set of technologies.” Getting to a simpler set of technologies, however, may require some work, given the wide range of what is offered now.

All on a USB Stick - by Barbara Krasnoff

Date: May 23, 2007
Client: MXI Security
Summary: USB flash drives have become ubiquitous, among both tech professionals and consumers. They're used to pass along product information at trade shows, as a means to take your data and apps with you (when your MP3 player doesn't have enough space), as a backup device -- and as a fashion statement.

MXI Security is offering a line of portable security devices that includes the Stealth MXP, a USB drive that not only provides password authentication, but biometric (i.e., fingerprinting) authentication as well, along with identity authorization. I caught a demo of the product at Interop, and it seemed to be a good solution for businesses that need portable security devices for, say, employees who work off-site, with the added attraction of up to 4 Gbytes of storage space for data. And the drives have retractable ports, which are always handy.

Controlling Mobile Device Chaos - by Ericka Chickowski

Develop Policies & Deploy Enforcement Technology For Security

Date: May 18, 2007
Client: MXI Security
Summary: If your enterprise is like most small to midsized enterprises, you’ve probably got more users than ever doing business out of the office. This legion of mobile workers is taking advantage of a growing range of devices to unchain themselves from their desks. While this is certainly a big boon for the business, it poses some difficulties for the typical IT organization.

There are certain manufacturers, such as MXI Security, that create security-conscious thumb drives designed to protect data while enabling portability. These special devices are encrypted and require fingerprint authentication to access data contained within the devices. By limiting your organization to specific device and laptop models, it becomes easier to contain the chaos. “We work with partners to help corporations restrict USB device-use to only our device,” says Gabor Barta of MXI Security.

The Big Picture on Security - with Dan Verton

MXI Security Revs Up 3-Factor Mobility

Date: May 2007
Client: MXI Security
Summary: MXI Security, a division of Memory Experts International, has bolstered standard two-factor security authentication (something you know and something you have) with biometrics that add a third factor to the security equation — something you are.

I recently discussed MXI's secure mobile USB devices with the company's U.S. Federal Director, Brian Culhane, and their Regional Sales Director, Tilo Kunz.

Which way to go in BI? - by Stacy Cowley

VARs adapt to a market rocked by M&As and vendor competition

Date: May 14, 2007
Client: Claraview
Summary: David Jones, director of London-based Paragon Consulting Group, is one merger away from winning a bet. Anticipating the wave of consolidation sweeping through the business intelligence software market, he correctly forecast Oracle's recent takeover of Hyperion and Business Objects' purchase of Cartesis.

Solution providers are already feeling tremors from the seismic shifts. To adapt to the new realities, some are eyeing new alliances: "It took a bit of time for Oracle to get their arms around how to sell BI, but this year they're coming on pretty strong," said Sid Banerjee, CEO of BI services firm Claraview, Reston, Va.

"Any company that wants to be in this space should look at them very seriously." Banerjee said his firm is likely to add Oracle to its partner network, which currently includes companies such as SAS, Business Objects and Cognos.

Montreal firm outfits law enforcement with USB device - by Mari-Len De Guzman

City of London Police deploy MXI's Stealth MXP

Date: April 30, 2007
Client: MXI Security
Summary: A Canadian technology has given London’s peacekeepers lightweight ammunition, called Stealth MXP, to enable secure data portability. From Montreal-based MXI Security, Stealth MXP, is a USB device with built in biometric reader and encryption mechanism that allows workers to securely transport data from one location to another.

In addition to Stealth MXP, the City of London Police is also using MXI Security’s Outbacker MXP, a high-capacity external hard drive with the same security features as the Stealth MXP, but with larger storage capability. The tool is being used for certain large-scale operations that generate larger amounts of data to be stored and transported, according to Brailsford. “The confidence level of the officers in using these products is very high.”

Blended Computing: A Different Mix - by Michael Vizard

New collaboration technologies will shake up current concepts of how workers interact

Date: April 7, 2007
Client: CommuniClique
Summary: Everywhere you go these days, everybody in IT is talking about the need to provide better collaboration tools to their end users as part of a general drive to increase the productivity of employees. But when you start to examine the options available to boost collaboration among users, you quickly discover that you're about to take a trip down a very expensive rabbit hole.

You are also starting to see a growing interest in a number of software-as-a-service offerings such as Google Docs and CommuniClique. The difference in these services boils down to an offering from Google that by its very Web nature is a collaborative application versus CommuniClique, a program that makes it easier to track and share existing Microsoft Office documents.

Middleware makes data sharing easier for N.J. police - by Trudy Walsh

Date: April 4, 2007
Client: Crossflo Systems
Summary: The New Jersey State Police, pretty much like every other law enforcement organization in the past five years or so, has been working on improving its data sharing capabilities. The problem was an abundance of information silos, said Chris Rein, an IT program manager who has worked for the state police since 2005.

Wanting to take a standards-based approach, NJSP decided to use Crossflo Data Exchange (CDX), a browser-based middleware solution from Crossflo Systems Inc. The software provides secure cross-domain data sharing across disparate platforms and different data structures, said Joe Ramirez, Crossflo’s director of technical integration services.

Made for Each Other - by Richard Gamble

Date: April 2007
Client: BWise
Summary: The news that cartesis will offer Bwise’s governance, risk and compliance software in the Cartesis 10 BPM suite is one more sign that finding the right partner in tech has become a key competitive edge.

The latest piece of good news for companies seeking to make compliance a performance enhancer instead of a reactive drag on earnings comes from Cartesis, which in mid-March announced that it had bought the right to offer its customers the specialized BWise governance, risk and compliance (GRC) software and have it work smoothly within their Cartesis business performance management (BPM) system.

Compliance Platforms Emerging, Maturing - by James Kobielus

Date: March 6, 2007
Client: BWise
Summary: Compliance has been one of the dominant themes in the post-Enron age of corporate IT. Many software providers tout their offerings as solutions for complying with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) and every other regulatory mandate, industry best-practices framework and corporate internal policy.

Other GRC management platform vendors have equivalent features in their product suites; SAP is far from the leader in this emerging segment. Vendors such as BWise , CA , MEGA International and OpenPages have been active in the compliance arena for several years.

Claraview buys software consulting firm - by Ben Hammer

Date: January 23, 2007
Client: Claraview
Summary: Claraview has acquired HandsOn-BI, a consulting firm for business intelligence software, for an undisclosed amount. Reston-based Claraview advises businesses on how to best use software that analyzes unstructured data such as text in e-mails, customer complaints and news stories about a company or product.

A long haul for freight security - by John Moore

Date: February 26, 2007
Client: Crossflo Systems
Summary: The task of securing cargo in the United States involves a complex web of interconnected transportation systems, governmental jurisdictions and industry players. A big question for the government is how can it improve cargo security without impeding the flow of commerce.

Data-sharing initiatives are getting under way at individual ports, said Roger Hawkes, vice president of National Defense and Domestic Security at Crossflo, a provider of data-sharing software. However, the port environment is complex, often involving city, county or state government authorities or private owners, Hawkes said. A single waterway might have dozens of ports. For example, the 32-mile long Houston Ship Channel has more than 200 separate facilities.

Software Company's Strategy Pays Off - by Kim Hart

Date: February 1, 2007
Client: Claraview
Summary: After keeping a low profile for about six years, MicroStrategy has started to come out of its shell. The McLean data-mining company last week released solid fourth-quarter earnings, showing revenue growth for the fourth consecutive year. The company's continued growth since has triggered several third-party consultants to enter the market. Such companies, including Reston-based Claraview, sell and implement software from MicroStrategy and its competitors.

Sid Banerjee, one of the original members of the MicroStrategy team and chief executive of Claraview, said MicroStrategy is growing much more quickly than its competitors. "MicroStrategy has done a good job running much higher profit margins than competitors," he said. "That makes a big difference in our ability to market the product."

Claraview Acquires HandsOn-BI - by Renee Boucher Ferguson

Date: January 23, 2007
Client: Claraview
Summary: Claraview, the business intelligence consultancy that has provided BI systems to the likes of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Department of Education, is expanding its educational capabilities.

The company announced Jan. 23 the acquisition of HandsOn-BI, which provides BI and data warehousing architecture, planning and design services. The terms of the deal were undisclosed.