Despite the rush of new companies into systems integration, the really big contracts still tend to go to the established specialists, and the US Army has given its $1,600m 11-year contract to build and manage a network to link the National Guard and the Army Reserve so as to speed mobilisation in times of crisis, to Boeing Co’s Boeing Computer Services, which beat Computer Sciences Corp to the contract; the hardware part of the contract goes mainly to Digital Equipment Corp but that company values it at only about $150m; the requirement is for 28,000 microcomputers at 4,700 locations to link 9,800 National Guard and Reserve units in the US.
