Industry watch

Northrop Advances in Federal IT

Northrop Grumman Corp. continued its march on the federal information

techno-logy marketplace with its $150 million cash purchase last week of

Sterling Software (U.S.) Inc.

The purchase marks Northrop's fifth acquisition in the government IT

sector and will provide yet another boost for Logicon Inc., a Northrop Grumman

company.

"Northrop Grumman is very strong on the defense side of things, and

Sterling's strength is in the intelligence area, so it is a good fit," said

Philip Kiviat, president of the Kiviat Group, a sales and marketing company

catering to IT firms in the federal sector.

Sterling U.S., also known as Sterling's Federal Systems Group, earned

$159 million in revenue last year and specializes in intelligence systems;

command, control and communications; air traffic management; weather systems;

and simulation.

Sun, NIC Form E-Gov Alliance

NIC will become the first e-government company to join Sun Microsystems

Inc.'s elite ServiceProvider.com initiative, which offers customers a package

of products and services tailored to their needs.

The deal, which was announced Sept. 18, will have both companies jointly

promoting NIC's e-government solutions worldwide.

Once NIC obtains SunTone certification, applications and Sun platforms

will be integrated into solutions for federal, state, local and international

government clients, said Chris Ramsey, vice president of the market development

division at NIC.

Two More for GTSI

Government customers gained new access to e-business and fault-tolerance

services thanks to a pair of alliances announced last week by GTSI Corp.

GTSI now offers its public-sector customers Internet Services Management

solutions from Resonate Inc. The second alliance makes GTSI the first business-to-government

provider to offer Resilience Corp.'s complete line of hardware fault-tolerant

servers.

Resonate's ISM platform is a family of software and services that perform

real-time automated corrective action on e-business applications, systems

and networks.

Resilience products and services run all Sun Microsystems Inc. Solaris

applications.