Reston, VA October 10th 2003: Global Computer Enterprises (GCE) announced today that it had successfully implemented the first enterprise-wide, Web Services based IT system in the history of the federal government. The Federal Procurement Data System – Next Generation (FPDS-NG) was developed by GCE in response to an April 2003 award made by the General Services Administration (GSA) to re-engineer an existing data collection system.
Unlike its predecessor, FPDS-NG is designed to serve as a federal-wide acquisition management information system and gives unprecedented visibility into procurement and acquisition activities within federal government agencies, while at the same time removing costly feeder systems and redundant data warehouses.
FPDS-NG is the first system to be deployed government-wide as part of the Integrated Acquisition Environment (IAE) which is key program element of the President’s Management Agenda. The President’s agenda outlines 24 E-Government projects that are expected to utilize new technology to transform the way the government works by streamlining business processes and reducing costs.
“We believe that FPDS-NG sets a new standard for how quickly an enterprise-wide system can be implemented,” said Ray Muslimani, President of GCE. “By taking advantage of a new set of integration technologies known as Web Services, GCE has been able to provide interoperability between FPDS-NG and federal government procurement and acquisition systems without the use of proprietary software or making extensive changes to existing systems,” said Mr. Muslimani.
“In less than 6 months, GCE was able to fully implement FPDS-NG in order to be ready to go live by the beginning of the fiscal year. This establishes a new model for large scale, real-time information and services sharing between IT systems in the federal government,” said Mr. Muslimani.
“I believe that FPDS-NG not only validates our revolutionary ideas of how to interoperate between federal IT systems, but this effort truly demonstrates the capabilities of a small business. Small businesses can do great things when given the opportunity,” commented David Lucas, Director of Business Development for GCE.
“FPDS-NG is expected to save taxpayers millions of dollars per year as it will immediately enable the dismantling of dozens of IT systems across the government,” said David Drabkin, Deputy Associate Administrator for Acquisition Policy at GSA.
“The data collection will be in real-time and allow lawmakers, administrators, industry and the public, snap-shots of where and how taxpayer money is being spent. This system is more than just a technical innovation, it is an important tool for our democracy,” explained Mr. Drabkin.
GCE has built FPDS-NG with a variety of innovative technologies including XML, Java, and Oracle’s real application clustering (RAC). “By utilizing Linux and RAC we were able to keep the development costs extremely low without compromising the scalability of the system. FPDS-NG is expected to process more than 1 million transactions per month from over 100,000 registered users from all over the world,” stated Nancy Gunsauls, Project Manager of FPDS-NG for GCE.
“FPDS-NG represents the first step in a long process of reforming the way government IT systems serve the citizenry,” said Teresa Sorrenti, Project Manager for the Integrated Acquisition Environment (IAE) at GSA.
The IAE’s goal is to support the President’s agenda of providing cost effective solutions to agencies by simplifying and unifying business processes. FPDS-NG fulfills this promise by providing business services to agencies such that at the agency level, there is no longer the burden of maintaining IT systems to collect, validate, and analyze this data.
“FPDS-NG will eliminate the use of four different standard forms and supports our goal of dramatically reducing paperwork and complexity in the federal acquisition environment,” said Ms. Sorrenti.
General Services Administration
GSA, a centralized Federal procurement and property management agency, was created by Congress to improve government efficiency and help agencies better serve the public. Its 14,000 associates acquire office space, information technology, other office supplies and services for 1 million federal workers in 8,000 buildings in 1,600 U.S. communities.
Global Computer Enterprises, Inc.
GCE is a small business that specializes in large-scale systems integration using Oracle, Java, Web Services and XML technologies. Established in 1998 as a full-service government IT provider, GCE has dedicated itself to quality service and client satisfaction, becoming a leading provider of custom software development, operations and management services, and business improvement services to the federal government.
For more information on GCE and their efforts, please visit www.gce2000.com or contact David Lucas, Director of Business Development at 703-390-5353.
Gaithersburg, MD, June 9, 2003--Washington Technology Magazine of PostNewsweek Press featured GCE President/CEO Ray Muslimani on its cover and website this week, singling out GCE's strategy of building prototypes as a key to success for small businesses. The article outlines GCE's prototype strategy and how small and medium-sized businesses compete and win against the large companies that traditionally dominate the federal marketplace. The cover story describes how several companies have used different business development models for capturing business from the federal government. GCE's model is to build prototypes and to prime contracts. Ray Muslimani is prominently featured in a photo on the cover as well as a photo within the magazine and offers one of the '7 Strategies for Successful Small Businesses' the magazine recommends to other small businesses. Most notably in both the magazine and on the website, Ray comments that, "You have to believe from the top down that you are good enough to prime." The article recognizes the hard work of GCE's employees and how GCE is gaining customers and improving its prospects as a world class government IT services provider. David Lucas, Director of Business Development, said, "GCE's employee efforts have produced a company worth spotlighting and holding up as an example of how a small business can prime large, important, high visibility projects - and when needed - go the extra mile to produce world class business development tools like our prototype or an animated movie." "As long as the rest of the world is content to be average," David said, "GCE will continue to prosper."
Click here to read the article.
Other articles have also appeared about GCE/GSA in:Gaithersburg, MD, May 1, 2003--Global Computer Enterprises (GCE) announced today that it had been awarded a $24 million dollar contract from the General Services Administration (GSA) for the development, implementation and operation of the Federal Procurement Data System – Next Generation (FPDS-NG). The current system will be re-engineered to take advantage of new technology that will allow for millions of transactions to be recorded and reported upon in real-time, while providing tremendous cost savings to the federal government.
“This is a key victory for GCE and our partners,” stated Ray Muslimani, President of GCE. “We have worked for more than a year on producing a prototype that proves that a services-oriented architecture employing web services, open standards, and XML, can be the underpinning of a federal enterprise system.”
“Federal enterprise systems have hardly scratched the surface when it comes to real-time interoperability. The potential for information sharing between systems is vast, with huge implications for the nation’s financial, procurement, logistics and security domains,” stated Venkatesh Kalluru, Chief Technology Officer for GCE.
FPDS-NG is the first system in the Federal Government designed from the ground up with large scale integration capabilities – it will integrate with every government procurement system in real-time. GCE's Plug & Play Integration™ architecture provides a sound model for interoperability between federal enterprise systems.
GCE partnered with IBM, Oracle, and Business Objects in their bid to win this contract. “We have taken a best-of breed-approach with respect to our partners,” stated David Lucas, Director of Business Development for GCE. “IBM is the leading provider of hosting services, business process re-engineering, and investment in web services. Oracle provides the GSA with real application clustering, a cost-saving application server technology that allows for the scalability required of an enterprise-wide system. Business Objects is the clear market leader in providing web-based reporting tools that will transform the data collected by FPDS-NG into business intelligence.”
One of the GSA’s key objectives is the reduction of transaction costs from nearly $40.00 per transaction to under $1.00. “The FPDS-NG re-engineering effort is a critical e-Government initiative because the award data that it collects helps Congress and the public understand how taxpayer funds are being spent everyday by the government,” said David Drabkin, Deputy Associate Administrator For Acquisition Policy. He continued, “Right now, the collection and reporting upon such spending is an expensive and time consuming process. We look forward to the benefits of a real-time, fully integrated, FPDS-NG beginning next fiscal year.”
“The Government was looking for an innovative approach to make Government systems more responsive to management and to drive the cost down,” said John Cochran, Senior IT Specialist for the project. “GCE offered an early stage implementation that demonstrated solutions and gives a high level of confidence in their ability to meet our requirements.”
Federal procurement systems currently rely on batch interfaces to provide procurement data to the FPDS. “The timeliness, accuracy and availability of the data are areas that we are looking to dramatically improve with FPDS-NG. The technology and methodology of GCE, IBM, and our partners, will achieve unprecedented visibility into federal spending,” commented David Lucas.
GCE will make FPDS-NG more responsive to the needs of customers through availability of “real time” on-line reports, collection of additional data for better management and support for the small business community, and incorporation of new technologies that enable contracting agencies to reduce the burden of submitting the required data.
Program goals include:
The time and cost savings will be achieved by using new technologies to collect data directly from the contract writing systems increasingly used throughout the Federal Government to support contracting activities. This electronic interoperability will also allow contracting agencies to reduce or eliminate some of the manual processes required to collect and summarize information about the millions of smaller procurements.
Under this contract, GCE is responsible for creating and maintaining all aspects of the FPDS-NG. Areas of responsibility include: application hosting, reporting functionality that incorporates the latest OLAP and data mining technologies, training for users and administrators, help desk operations, real-time integration with agency procurement systems, the creation of many web services, and establishing an authoritative XML specification for procurement data.
About GCE, Inc.
GCE (www.gce2000.com) is a small business that specializes in large-scale systems integration using Oracle, Java, web services and XML technologies. Established in 1998 as a full-service government IT provider, GCE has dedicated itself to quality service and client satisfaction, becoming a leading provider of custom software development, operations and management services, and business improvement services to the federal government. We have provided customers such as Department of Transportation and Department of Homeland Security with innovative applications for enhancing their business processes, enabling them to realize cost efficiencies, provide better customer service, and introduce new business capabilities.
For more information, contact
Director of Business Development
Global Computer Enterprises, Inc.
703.390.5353
Washington DC - April 27, 2002 - Global Computer Enterprises, Inc. (GCE) announced today a joint effort with Oracle Corporation to develop a mobile computing platform to provide United States Coast Guard (USCG) cutter personnel the ability to easily perform financial transactions from remote locations. The new platform, called LUFS to GO, is an extension of an existing system known as Large Unit Financial System (LUFS) that is widely used by procurement and contracting personnel throughout USCG.
LUFS to GO gives cutter personnel the ability to perform all LUFS functions from the cutter, said Ray Muslimani, President of GCE. Using GCE's Plug and Play Integration methodology and Oracle's latest release of Oracle Lite, LUFS to GO gives the cutters on demand access to their financial desktop applications without the strain on resources typically associated with the extension of an enterprise system.
We are excited by the prospect of providing LUFS to GO to the cutter fleet without changing our readiness requirements, stated Avie Snow, Chief, Systems Development and Implementation, USCG. LUFS to GO is resource friendly. There is no need for an onboard system administrator or an Oracle Database Administrator. In fact, LUFS to GO even works without consistent connectivity by allowing a batch process for synchronizing the cutter with the LUFS database on shore.
LUFS to GO will reduce current delays in data synchronization and enable USCG personnel to perform financial transactions and maintain important financial data at sea, anytime, anywhere, said Ray Muslimani.
Yes, this is the same fully functional application available on shore.
Yes, there is only one code base. No other implementation is necessary.
Yes, this is a full upload/download of data between FINCEN and your respective unit.
No, you do not need continuous connectivity. Data is batched and sent whenever connectivity is available. Synchronization is complete and near real time.
No, this is the same LUFS application your staff uses right now.
Yes, there is no massive reengineering of your enterprise application or a need for additional resources to run the mobile application.
No, your current staff can handle the task. And because there is no new hardware or software, you will not need a dedicated DBA or SA.
No, this technology will work with and/or adapt to your existing infrastructure.
This technology will work with any system that currently uses or will use an enterprise Oracle database.
To find out more about this technology and how it can serve you, speak with the following representative:
Director of Business Development
Global Computer Enterprises, Inc.
703.390.5353