The images of DLT Solutions’ old website serve as a nice little time capsule of the early days of the internet. Looking back, it’s hard to imagine how, as Internet users, we ever got through our daily surfing regiments with so little Web page functionality. But as more and more people turn to websites as their primary source for information, it’s clear a company’s website is often times their best asset to deliver information more fluently to their customers and employees. That’s why DLT launched our current website in Fall 2010.

Is Smart Grid coming soon to your neighborhood? Don't count on it. With respect to consumer Smart Meters, only about 25% of the installed base has been replaced or approved for replacement. Smart Grid's fundamental concept is that the addition of digital technologies to the electric utility distribution system will permit the monitoring, analysis, control and communications required to maximize throughput while reducing consumption. This will enable utilities to distribute electricity as efficiently as possible and allow end users to consume electricity as economically as possible. While the benefits of Smart Grid are well understood and the technologies to implement the Smart Grid vision have been developed and are rapidly maturing, deployments to date are limited. Let's be clear, however: Smart Grid is a global market where some countries are moving much faster than the USA and where global manufacturers and software companies with sophisticated offerings are staking claims to a share of the market. The worldwide Smart Grid product and services market has been estimated at $69 Billion in 2009 growing to $186 Billion by 2015.

With an IT budget in the hundreds of billions of dollars annually, it’s no surprise that many organizations compete for the coveted business opportunities within the public sector IT space. For two decades, DLT Solutions has provided government agencies and business customers with state-of-the-art technology products, services and solutions. And beginning in August of this year, DLT is celebrating its 20 year anniversary of successfully providing the best possible information technology solutions to our customers. In the past 20 years, we have learned quite a bit about the challenges and opportunities of selling and marketing to the government; from aligning ourselves with top-tier manufacturers to provide systems integrators, resellers, and end customers with best-in-class software, hardware, and the services to make them both work. And, at the same time, provide our manufacturer partners with award-winning, best-in-class, sales, marketing and operational support.

Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day; teach a man to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. At DLT we’ve adhered to that popular Chinese proverb in order to better inform our customers about cloud computing solutions. While it is clear that cloud technology offers many benefits, it is often unclear for users and agencies to know where they should start in architecting cloud for their organization. There's a lot of messaging out there around cloud, some of it's rather conflicting or confusing, so at DLT we're trying to demystify some of the cloud marketing that's out there and separate reality from marketing, to enable our customers to leverage this technology to really draw better efficiencies within their IT.

CEO by day, rocker by night. OK, not exactly. But when our President and CEO Rick Marcotte takes stage and channel his inner rock star, he doesn’t disappoint. As a talented drummer, throughout high school and college Rick was a bit of a budding rock star. In fact, a large number of the Senior Management team have musical backgrounds. Russ Holmes, Senior Vice President of the Enterprise Applications division plays bass; Chris Laggini, Vice President of Human Resources and Jim Helou, Vice President of the Autodesk Government/Geospatial Data Systems Division both play guitar. Add in the rest of the senior management team as backup singers or tambourine/cowbell players, and collectively, they’re the DLT house band, Aged and Confused.

Back in October of 2009, DLT Solutions’ was running on all cylinders. After three consecutive years of 20 percent sales growth year over year, and crossing the half-billion mark in sales in 2008, we were poised to continue the strong growth trend into 2010 and beyond. TZP Capital Partners I, a private equity fund focused on investments in U.S.-based middle market business and consumer services companies had taken notice of our success and decided it wanted to financially invest in our future achievements.

Every year around the holiday season, we all get in the giving spirit. You put your spare change in a bucket, get an extra gift for a loved one, and maybe even bake some cookies for someone. Well, at DLT Solutions, the holiday spirit gets kicked up a few notches in the form of our annual Toys for Tots Competitive Toy Drive. Toys for Tots is a US Marine Corps-run program with the objective of helping less fortunate children throughout the United States experience the joy of Christmas.

A recent New York Times article spells out the issues around federal cloud computing adoption explaining “such high praise for new Internet technologies may be common in Silicon Valley, but it is rare in the federal government, where concerns about security are paramount”. Agencies are notably concerned about losing responsibility for managing and securing data as well as the possibility of cloud outages. However, there are agencies with fewer concerns about security breaches and they have been busy moving user accounts and email services to the cloud environment. For example, the Agriculture Department has already moved about 46,000 employee accounts and is in the process of adding another 120,000. NASA has also made the migration by launching their own internal Nebula cloud computing platform. This platform provides a range of services powerful enough to manage all of NASA’s large-scale scientific data sets.

Late last month I joined over 500 people gathered at the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM) annual Training Event in Philadelphia to discuss progress in NIEM adoption, hear about tools that have been developed by government and industry to facilitate NIEM processes, and learn about best practices developed by the NIEM community. In addition to 20 federal agencies and 40 state and local government agencies, both Canada and Mexico were represented by senior government IT executives. A range of very diverse projects were discussed at the Philadelphia event, including the initial Canada-USA-Mexico data exchange project that will facilitate sharing of stolen vehicle data beginning in 2012. So, what is NIEM and why all the buzz? NIEM is, at its most fundamental level, a U.S. Federal government initiative that promotes the accurate exchange of data between organizations through the use of Extensible Markup Language (XML). This may sound elementary - after all, this was what XML was intended to be used for since its approval as a W3C recommendation in 1998. However, when two or more participants in a data exchange begin to work through the 'details' it becomes readily apparent that the vocabulary that one uses internally may be quite different from that used by the other. For example, does the database field identified as 'Name' by one entity refer to a person or something else? A person's full name? Including suffixes? Is the database field 'surname' equivalent to the second agency's database field 'Last_Name' or a local police department's field 'perpetrator'? Is a single agency's internal database design guideline consistent across various databases from which data might be pulled for sharing as a consolidated record about some individual?

Data protection is an essential part of every IT strategy. A good data protection plan minimizes the risk of downtime and data loss as well as the risk of a compliance incident. Most enterprise level data protection implementations are complex, costly and require thoughtful planning to ensure that the risk of data loss is reduced to an acceptable level. As with any technology there is no shortage of catch phrases to distract the overburdened administrator as well as the budget conscious executive. Phrases like “Integrated Data Protection”, “Industry Leading”, “End to End” and yes, even “cloud”. Let’s face it. The only reason you spend a dime on this stuff is to reduce risk because risk adds cost to your operation. The cost of data re-entry, the cost of down time or the cost of compliance fines. How simple or complex the system that you create to deal with risk is not the issue. The issue is whether the cost of the system is less than the risk of doing nothing.