The Tennessee Valley Authority is to buy up to $50m of workstations, personal computers and software for the first phase of a shift to open systems and a client-server environment. The largest electricity utility in the US, says Computer Systems News, is accepting bids for the five year plan, which could lead to a possible $150m contract. The specifications include Unix-based hardware, networking, systems software and a rewrite of the TVA’s 1,500 applications. The Authority has drawn up an Information Services Strategic Plan in conjunction with Coopers & Lybrand and Gartner Group Inc, and it details technical directions for the coming decade. The plan is to decrease dependancy on IBM’s SNA and to focus on workstations for both office and engineering tasks; also, to rewrite applications and reduce the number of database management systems. The initial plan, the Accelerated Delivery System Contract, is deliberately vague and apart from the $50m ceiling, does not have specified numbers. This is said to provide greater flexibility when making decisions about requirements and types of equipment. The Authority task force is evaluating different systems at present to decide whether stand-alone, departmental of enterprise-wide computing should predominate. The Accelerated Delivery System, which focuses on the low-end, is not open to tender for another month, but the open systems contract, now being defined, will focus on the higher-end, from servers to minis. It is to consolidate the Authority’s four proprietary networks – Prime Computer Inc, Control Data Corp, IBM Corp and Wang Laboratories Inc – into one open systems network. The Tennessee Valley Authority is directed by the Federal government to use the Government Open Systems Interconnection Profile as its networking protocol, and that is said to be one reason for the move away from IBM to an open systems environment. The networks are to be converted to TCP/IP within the next 18 months, and local area networks will be either Token-Ring or Ethernet, although it has still to decide which server will link the 31 local area networks to the wide area network. It has 20 Prime systems, 120 Wang systems, plus two Control Data, two IBM 3090s and two 4381s to link together.
