The two finalists for the lucrative Corporate Headquarters Office Technology system or Chots project were finally announced by the UK Ministry of Defence at the very end of last month, the winners being British Telecommunications Plc, heading up a consortium comprising Honeywell Bull Ltd, Nixdorf UK Ltd, and Secure Information Systems Ltd, Telecom’s 51%-owned joint […]
The two finalists for the lucrative Corporate Headquarters Office Technology system or Chots project were finally announced by the UK Ministry of Defence at the very end of last month, the winners being British Telecommunications Plc, heading up a consortium comprising Honeywell Bull Ltd, Nixdorf UK Ltd, and Secure Information Systems Ltd, Telecom’s 51%-owned joint venture with SD-Scicon Plc; and the Topix consortium, headed by ICL Ltd with BICC Plc, Coopers & Lybrand, Data Logic Ltd and Hewlett-Packard UK (CI No 1,004). The award is for a prototype system for installation in January 1990, and following an evaluation period, the final choice of supplier will be made. Chots will eventually comprise a large number of Unix systems supporting over 12,000 terminals and 3,000 printers. Secure office automation facilities conforming to the Orange Book B1 classification are a requirement, as access to other defence systems will be available from desktop terminals. British Telecom successfully strengthened its own consortium by helping fund Secure Information Systems (CI No 880), set up from security specialists within the then Systems Designers Plc: the major office software element will come from Uniplex Ltd. ICL’s Topix – for Trusted Office Partnership – consortium will use Computer Consoles Inc’s Officepower running on a mixture of ICL and Hewlett-Packard secure systems. ICL and Hewlett are collaborating on a secure version of the Unix, an effort being co-ordinated by Data Logic in accordance with Posix and X/Open standards, while BICC Data Networks will converge its 100Mbit-per-second fibre-optic local area networks towards the emerging Fibre Digital Data Interface standards. The eventual value of the Corporate Headquarters Office project is estimated at some UKP300m.
