NEWS&ANALYSIS
the
buzz
WIRELESS
Nextel spectrum swap
OK’d by government
THE U.S. GOVERNMENT ACCOUNT-
ability Office last week cleared
the way for the Federal Communications Commission to move
Nextel Communications out of
the 800MHz spectrum, where
it interferes with police and fire
department radio signals, and
into a higher-frequency band.
The FCC in July announced
plans to move Nextel from the
800MHz spectrum it shares
with emergency responders to
the 1.9GHz band. If the FCC’s
plan is implemented, the move
will let Nextel offer expanded
voice and data services, including
high-speed Internet.
In other spectrum news this
month, Verizon Wireless announced it will buy all NextWave
Telecom’s PCS spectrum licenses
for $3 billion. Verizon will buy the
licenses after NextWave completes its bankruptcy reorganization. The deal, expected to close in
mid-2005, pending regulatory ap-
proval, will give Verizon 10MHz
and 20MHz licenses in the 1.9GHz
PCS frequency range in some 23
cities across the country.
The spectrum will let Verizon
expand its network capacity in
major metropolitan areas.
—Shelley Solheim
STORAGE
Sun beefs up StorEdge
management options
SUN MICROSYSTEMS WILL LAUNCH
improved storage, data management and compliance tools this
week.
Sun’s StorEdge Enterprise
Storage Manager Advanced
Application 3.0 management
portal reduces the complexity
of multivendor storage networks
via a single point of automated
monitoring, visualization and provisioning of resources, officials said.
The StorEdge 5310 NAS
(network-attached storage) appliance expands to 16TB of RAIDprotected storage and features file
system journaling and snapshots.
Sun will also debut Compliance
QUOTE OF THE WEEK
sis, the value-oriented E-2300
and mainstream E-4300.
—Jeffrey Burt
Archiving Software for the 5310
appliance. —Brian Fonseca
PCS
Gateway unit built
on BTX chassis
Dell to build third U.S.
manufacturing plant
GATEWAY IS ROLLING OUT THE FIRST
WITH DEMAND FOR ITS DESKTOP PCS
of its business desktops that use
the BTX model developed by
Intel.
Compared with the traditional
ATX model, BTX puts
all the hottest components—from processors to graphics
cards—in the center
of the chassis, where
they can be cooled by
a front-to-back airflow.
The result is more reliable, more energy-efficient and quieter PCs
that offer improved
cooling capabilities.
Earlier this fall, Gateway unveiled consumer desktops featuring the BTX chassis. Eventually,
all Gateway PCs will feature the
BTX chassis, officials said.
Gateway’s E-6300, priced starting at $989, offers Intel’s Pentium
4 chip with Hyper-Threading,
Serial ATA hard drives, up to 4GB
of DDR2 (double data rate 2)
memory and integrated Ethernet.
Gateway last week announced
two desktops with the ATX chas-
growing, Dell last week unveiled
plans to build a third U.S. manufacturing facility, in North Carolina,
to open next fall. The plant will
The Gateway
E-6300 offers the new BTX design.
build computers for Dell’s commercial and consumer customers
on the East Coast.
Dell’s other U.S. manufacturing
plants are in Lebanon, Tenn., and
Austin, Texas.
About 700 new jobs will be
created in the first year, and that
number will scale to more than
1,500 in five years, Dell officials
said. —Jeffrey Burt
BY THE NUMBERS
Federal CIO turnover rates
CURRENT CIOs*
PERMANENT
CIOs ONLY
Minimum
One month
One month
Median
15 months
16 months
Maximum
I’m constantly surprised at the rate of adoption of Eclipse into both new horizontal and
new vertical markets. Given those avenues
of growth, I’d say the movement to Eclipse
is only just beginning.
*Based on 108 acting and permanent CIOs polled.
Todd Williams, vice president of technology at Genuitec
Source: July 2004 GAO-04-823 CIO report
22 e W E E K n N O V E M B E R 1 5 , 2 0 0 4
94 months
94 months
Number of CIOs in
office less than 3 years
89
23
Percent of CIOs in
office less than 3 years
82
92
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