IBM Eastern Europe in Vienna announced on April 7 that it had won a contract valued at ‘several million dollars’ to supply the Romanian Ministry of the Interior with an ES/9000 mainframe, along with communications and disk subsystems, an optical library, magnetic tape systems and several hundred PS/2 personal computers. IBM will also be supplying the ministry with MVS/ESA, VTAM, CICS, DB2 and OS/2 software. The system is scheduled for delivery in mid-1994 and financing is being provided by the Austrian bank, Creditanstalt. It is scheduled to be fully operational by the first half of 1995. The computer system will used to create a ‘national information system’, the key function of which will be to manage a database on population registration and administer the use of personal identification cards which will issued to Romanian citizens for the purpose of using social security, health care, education and tax collection services. IBM Eastern Europe says that the identification system is based on an idea originally proposed by the European Community. The population database will be maintained at a central location by the Ministry of the Interior and at 41 regions, which will connected via leased and switched telephone lines. PS/2s, which will installed at 302 Population Registration Local Offices, will be installed on local area networks to the local regional centres or the national database. IBM announced that systems integration services will be provided by ICE Felix Computer SA, an IBM Business Partner – which it claims is the largest state-owned Romanian computer equipment producer – in close co-operation with MTIL-Enterprises Ltd, an Israeli consulting firm. IBM is itself represented in Romania by a privately-owned IBM Alliance Company, Romanian Business Systems, which is based in Bucharest, and will be responsible for supplying the hardware, systems software, education and local customer engineering services. Emil Dumitrescu, head of the Investment/Purchase and Logistics Department at the Ministry of the Interior – who holds the title Vice-Admiral, said that the ministry had evaluated a number of competing offerings and that its decision was determined by supplier experience and co-operation with local partners as well as performance criteria.
