“Ronald D. Sugar, who was named to Apple’s board of directors Wednesday, was chairman and CEO of Northrop Grumman in 2005 when the Los Angeles-based aerospace giant beat out IBM (IBM) in a bid to rebuild the state of Virginia’s computer infrastructure from top to bottom,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune.
“The contract — now valued at $2.4 billion, the largest in the state’s history — covered everything: mainframes, servers, desktops, laptops, voice and data networks, operating systems, e-mail, security, help desk and data center facilities,” P.E.D. reports. “For the people of Virginia, it’s been a nightmare, plagued with cost overruns, missed deadlines, security breaches and balky service.”
“The system, according to Marcella Williamson, a spokesperson for the Virginia Information Technologies Agency, is standardized on Hewlett-Packard hardware and Microsoft software. ‘We use the entire Microsoft stack,’ she told Fortune. ‘Exchange, SharePoint, Microsoft Office, SQL servers and .Net for development,” P.E.D. reports. “The big crash….hit last August, nearly nine months after Sugar’s retirement, when a data storage unit in Richmond warehouse failed and 26 of Virginia’s 89 departments lost computer service for as much as eight days. It was the worst computer disaster in the state’s history.”
P.E.D. reports, “They aren’t Apple computers,’ she says. ‘I can tell you that.'”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We could have told you they weren’t Apple computers, or even Macs, without having to ask. Virginia’s computer systems would work if they used quality hardware and software.
Hopefully, Sugar is bringing something of value to Apple’s BoD. God knows there’s some dead weight sitting there already – we won’t even get into the case of the finally eradicated mole.