Monday, December 31, 2001

Tally Systems expands reseller program

Published in Interface Tech News

LEBANON, N.H. ‹ IT asset inventory specialist Tally Systems recently closed a resale and distribution deal with Vancouver, British Columbia-based TechTrack Solutions. With this agreement, TechTrack plans to resell Tally's asset-tracking software and Web-based platform services, and may include Tally products in its own offerings.

"A lot of the revenue potential for this is over the long haul," said Randy Britton, communications director for Tally.

Tally offers two packages: TS.Census, a company intranet-based program for ongoing tracking at larger companies, and WebCensus, a Web-based application targeted at short-term users or smaller companies. Both provide customers with specific reports on installed hardware and software, including CPU components and application serial numbers, to assist companies with inventory and IT asset tracking.

"They get results in a matter of days," Britton said of WebCensus clients, many of whom are planning the timing and scope of hardware and software upgrades. "Knowing what you have in place really helps you to make that decision," he added.

Patricia Adams, a senior research analyst studying IT asset management for the Gartner Group, agrees, and said there is a lot of growth in this area right now.

"What's driving this is the recession," she said. "Companies are now tightening back on their spending." That leaves software companies coming up short in their sales figures, so they are auditing their clients.

According to Adams, while the typical response to audits used to be purchasing more than enough additional licenses to be compliant and leaving it at that, companies are now saying, "Let's just quickly run an inventory."

"It's more a project focus than a long-term focus," Adams said. But she added that some companies are even seeing value in continuing asset tracking.

Companies that know where their assets are can retire them when they're no longer needed, recover unused software license fees, and renegotiate bulk deals to save money. Also, Adams said, they can plan upgrades more efficiently, knowing ahead of time what hardware will need to be replaced to support a new software package such as Windows 2000 or Windows XP.

"Asset management has always been around," Adams said, but "now it's really coming of age."

Thursday, December 27, 2001

Students aim for military academies

Published in the Current

At a time when there has been a spike in patriotism, across the country, four local young men are applying to take the long road into military service.

They are aiming for admission to the country’s elite service academies, and if they get in and make it through, they will come out as leaders – officers in the Navy, Army, Air Force, Marines or Merchant Marine.

Dan Shevenell and David Greenwood of Cape Elizabeth, and Matt Reichl and Ben Tourangeau of Scarborough, have been nominated by Maine’s congressional delegation to attend U.S. military and service academies next year.

Nomination is not the final step in applications to the academies, but neither is it the first. In addition to multiple pieces of paperwork beyond a standard college application, there is a physical exam, questioning by nomination boards and interviews at the academies. Each is a key step, and nomination by a U.S. senator or representative is the most common way for civilians to enter the academies.

It is an introduction to government bureaucracy and teaches an important lesson: Despite the piles of paper, “it doesn’t take all that long,” according to one applicant.

Two from Scarborough
Scarborough resident and Cheverus High student, Ben Tourangeau, is applying to the Merchant Marine Academy after being approached by the soccer coach there. The academy’s was but one of several recruitment letters Tourangeau has gotten from schools around the nation who want the star Cheverus player on their team.

He looked at the experience, including traveling while in school, and was impressed when he visited the campus. He also considered what would happen after graduation.

“The job acceptance when you graduate (from the Merchant Marine Academy) is really high,” Tourangeau said.

He also thought about his dream. “I want to be a Navy Seal,” he said. He said a lot of folks might be expecting him to play a lot of soccer and even get involved in a semi-professional league. But he said it’s time for a change. He’ll still play and enjoy soccer at the academy, he said, but it won’t be his primary focus.

“This is going to be a big challenge,” he said. And if he doesn’t get in? He’ll probably go to the Naval Academy Prep School and aim to go to Annapolis from there.

Matt Reichl’s father was in the Navy, and he’s following in those footsteps by applying to the Naval Academy and the Merchant Marine Academy. He also takes inspiration, he said, from Red Sox star Ted Williams, who said he felt his time in the military was among his most valuable experience.

The Scarborough High senior sent out his applications two months ago and is hoping to hear back from the schools before New Year’s. He is also applying to civilian schools, and hasn’t decided about whether he’ll get involved in ROTC or not.

“I run to the mail every day,” Reichl said.

He said Sept. 11 hasn’t changed his mind about the military, and he accepts the risk of war.

“It’s something the country has to do,” Reichl said.

Reichl said the country needs graduates from the military academies even more now. “What they really need now is leaders,” he said.

He said his parents also support his decision. “My parents are 100 percent behind me, whatever I choose to do,” he said.

The local students have been nominated to one or more of the following schools: the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md., the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy at Kings Point, N.Y., the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., and the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo. The U.S. Coast Guard Academy at New London, Conn., does not require applicants to be nominated.

Cape Elizabeth’s nominees
Cape’s Dan Shevenell has been planning to apply to service academies for four years. “My decision to apply to a service academy started freshman year,” he said.

Shevenell, who is nominated to the Naval, Merchant Marine and Air Force academies and will apply to the Coast Guard Academy as well, said terrorism made him more certain of his choice.

“Sept. 11 made me definitely want to go to a service academy,” he said.

He is not a hawk, he said, and is concerned about risking his life in battle, but sees a greater good he can serve. At the academies, he said, students “train for war and they thank God that they don’t have to use that training very often.”

He wants to become a leader, and the quality of education – not to mention getting paid to go to college – makes the academies more attractive Shevenell said.

He also sees an important element of the system of checks and balances at work in the nomination process. “The Congress gets to nominate all their officers and controls their funding,” he said.

Shevenell’s eggs are not in one basket, and he is applying through the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) to civilian colleges and universities. He is not choosy about which service he ends up in, but he does have a goal.

“I’d like to be a pilot,” he said.

So much so, in fact, that he has already started working on his private pilot’s license. He thinks flying with the Coast Guard would be particularly challenging, since they do a lot of their work in bad weather.

“You can’t argue with a storm,” Shevenell said.

David Greenwood of Cape enlisted in the Marine Corps back in August, and is applying to the Naval Academy and to West Point. He wants to be in the infantry. He said he has a lot of family in the military, including a brother in the Marines now.

He hasn’t questioned his enlistment, even in light of recent events. “When Sept. 11 came, I knew I’d made the right choice,” Greenwood said.

He was in the Naval Cadet Corps for four years up at Brunswick Naval Air Station and is also applying through ROTC to various civilian colleges.

Packy McFarland leaves behind a legend of caring

Published in the Current

Edward “Packy” McFarland died Dec. 19 after a long battle with heart trouble. It was a strong, all-embracing heart, for which he was admired by most people in Scarborough, and for which they honored him during his life and after his death. His heart was his greatest asset and, in the end, his final weakness.

“He was extremely good at motivating kids that were atypical athletes,” said current Scarborough High School athletic director Frank Spencer. “He made them feel good about themselves.”

And that is perhaps his lasting legacy in Scarborough. Former players and students remember him as a great man, with some corny catch-phrases like “A boy in sports is a boy not in trouble.”

But Dan Warren, one of Packy’s players who grew up to live and work and coach baseball in Scarborough, said he often finds himself repeating Packy’s pithy platitudes to his own players, 30 years later.

Warren, who played on Packy’s last conference championship baseball team in 1971, became even better friends with him as an adult than they had ever been at the high school.

“He was a tremendous people person,” Warren said. “He makes great eye contact with everybody, and this was a guy who was legally blind for the last 10 years of his life. He would put himself six or eight inches from your face and have a conversation.”

Warren remembers that Packy said coaching high school basketball was one of the hardest things he ever did, in a life that included service in World War II and work as a shipbuilder. In Maine, Packy would say, there’s not much to do in the winter, and people really care about their basketball teams.

So any minor outing to a store or a gas station could become a fully involved discussion between coach and angry fan questioning the decision to play a full-court press in last night’s game.

But Packy would take these discussions in stride, saying that everyone had a right to have access to their team’s coach.

Warren said that’s a principle that is missing from today’s sports world.

Looking out for others
Also missing today, according to some, is a sense of community spirit Packy embodied.

Mark Buttarazzi, now a dentist in Scarborough, played baseball for Packy in the early 1970s. “His players and students always came first,” Buttarazzi said. “Their accomplishments meant a lot to him.”

He had no trouble getting his players to give their all. “He was the type of guy you just wanted to play your heart out for,” Buttarazzi said. “He could get 110 percent out of everybody.”

Buttarazzi said Packy’s motto, “Quitters never win and winners never quit,” helped him get through college and graduate school. Packy’s devotion to the community was a model for Buttarazzi, who came back to Scarborough to give back to the community that had given him so much.

He started his own dental practice, and learned again that quitting was not a formula for success. Packy helped him get involved in coaching youth baseball, too.

“Packy was the type of guy who gave a lot to the community,” Buttarazzi said. “I always admired that.”

Warren said Packy helped him see the value in getting involved in the community and in giving to charitable causes. “He just pushed me, but he always did it gently,” Warren said.

A long and storied career
Packy taught and coached at Scarborough High School for 26 years, retiring in 1983, the same year the school’s baseball field was given his name.

But long before that, the caring man and athlete made his mark on Maine. As a student at Bowdoin College, he was captain of the basketball team for three straight years and made All-American as a senior.

He helped start Bowdoin’s intercollegiate baseball team, and was its first captain.

Despite hearing loss due to a head injury during a basketball game early in his career, he was a successful coach and history teacher. And, for every student who remembers working hard in Packy’s demanding classes, there are players who remember a man driven to help them succeed.

In their success he found his own, getting elected to the Maine Baseball Hall of Fame as a coach in 1993. He also has been honored as a Maine Sports Legend. But Warren said it’s not the awards and honors, it’s not the championship titles and the prestige of being a big name in Maine sports. “It’s how he used it,” Warren said.

He would teach in stories, but not tooting his own horn. Instead, Warren remembers, he would tell a story about how he failed because he didn’t do something the right way. And he would say what happened, and what he thought about that now. It was a way of teaching, Warren said, that really reached his audience.

It wasn’t just that way on the field, but in the classroom as well. He would start with a paragraph from a textbook and launch into stories about his service in the war, or other lessons he had learned. “He brought the outside world into the classroom,” Warren said.

A good family man
“A lot of my favorite memories are about going to the games,” said Martha Williams, Packy’s daughter and an English teacher at Scarborough High. The teams, she said, were a part of the family. Martha’s mother, Alice, would cook dinners for the teams before big games.

Her brother played on basketball and baseball teams for Packy, but even before that, the coach’s games were family affairs.

And beyond the coaching, Packy was a good father. “He would come home and read to us,” Williams said. “He was a very caring, compassionate father.”

Packy took his family from Freedom Academy, where he started out as a coach of boys and girls basketball, to Gorham High School for 10 years. And then he came to Scarborough, and the school was never the same.

“He just loved people and they gave it back,” Williams said.

Williams, who started teaching at the school before her father retired, said he was always a great person to have around as a parent, colleague and friend.

“He had a great sense of humor,” Williams said.

He kept that upbeat spirit even in the darkest days of the Red Sox, his beloved team. He never gave up on them, or any of his students or players. He always gave more than he got, but he got more than he could have imagined.

And now the question is, Warren said, “How do we take up the torch?”

Thursday, December 20, 2001

Gorman back in Maine, claims innocence in murder probe

Published in the Current; co-written with Brendan Moran

The Scarborough man wanted for questioning in the murder of Amy St. Laurent has been brought back to Maine after fleeing, but his attorney has told police his client didn’t kill the woman.

Jeffrey “Russ” Gorman’s lawyer said Tuesday outside of the Cumberland County Courthouse that his client was “innocent” in the murder of Amy St. Laurent.

“He didn’t do it,” Clifford Strike told a reporter from the Portland Press Herald. “He is not responsible for Miss St. Laurent’s death.”

Although Gorman, 21, of Scarborough, has been named as a suspect in the case by the press since court documents linked him to the crime, the Portland Police haven’t charged anyone with the crime. They have said repeatedly that he is not a suspect in the case.

Portland Police Chief Michael Chitwood said he expects to make an arrest in the “near future,” but declined to be specific.

“The person should know we’re coming,” said Chitwood.

Detectives continued to search the area off County Road where St. Laurent’s body was found for clues this week, but Chitwood did not say what, if anything, had been found.

“The investigation is being conducted methodically and professionally,” Chitwood said.

Gorman was arrested outside of Troy, Ala., last week, after a four-hour stand off, and extradited to Maine for probation violations in an unrelated theft.

“Maine authorities advised Troy police they needed to talk to Gorman in connection with a missing person case which allegedly occurred in October. The missing person’s body was later found in a small town near Portland, Maine,” read a press release from the Troy Police Department.

Chitwood refused to comment on the Alabama press release.

Gorman lived at 68 County Road in Scarborough for the past couple of years with his mother and other relatives.

The home is just a few hundred yards from where the body was found.

Gorman was born in Troy. He grew up and attended high school there, according to Sgt. Benny Scarbrough of the Troy Police Department.

Scarbrough knew of Gorman most of the time he was living in Troy. He knew when Gorman left Troy for Florida, only to return later.

“I don’t want to talk about anything while he was a juvenile,” said Scarbrough.

Gorman hadn’t been in Troy for more than a few weeks before police arrested him at an acquaintance’s home outside of Troy. Police got a tip that led them to the residence, after Gorman allegedly pulled a gun on someone outside a business in Troy.

Troy Police were able to evacuate everyone from the residence before the standoff.

But Gorman refused to be arrested for four hours.

Gorman was holding two guns. Scarbrough said he was cooperative and didn’t make any demands, other than asking for a phone. He didn’t threaten anyone, but did put the gun to his own head a couple of times.

Police negotiators refused to give Gorman a phone. Negotiations were broken off several times so that traffic could get through on the highway.

Gorman even held his guns out of sight as the traffic passed at the request of the police, according to Scarbrough.

Police negotiators eventually traded a cigarette for one of Gorman’s guns and ended the standoff peacefully.

The day after his arrest, Gorman waived extradition proceedings, speeding his return to Maine. He was flown back Dec. 14, escorted by officers from the Maine Department of Corrections.

Monday, December 17, 2001

Lightbridge tightens reins

Published in Interface Tech News

BURLINGTON, Mass. ‹ Continuing its post-merger shuffling of personnel and resources, mobile business services company Lightbridge is closing one of its four offices and shifting tasks and employees to the remaining three. Most of the employees have left the Palo Alto, Calif. office, although a few will remain through May.

Its February 2001 acquisition of prepaid mobile services specialist Corsair Communications, based in Palo Alto and Irvine, meant Lightbridge had two offices in California ‹ in addition to its Burlington headquarters and its software development center outside Denver.

Nearly 100 employees were affected, though most were offered the option of relocating to Irvine, the company said. Many will do so, while others will leave Lightbridge.

Lynne Smith, Lightbridge's director of corporate communications, said this was a planned event based on the company's business needs, rather than a response to the economic downturn.

"This wasn't about taking hits," Smith said. "We are still quite profitable. This was a real business decision."

The overhead associated with keeping the additional office open was an inefficient burden on the company, Smith said, and bringing together staff who perform similar functions will help move Lightbridge toward its renewed focus on mobile business services.

"We are a conservatively managed company," Smith said, emphasizing that Wall Street's response to the consolidation was positive.

Analyst Iain Gillott of iGillott Research said the company was making a smart move, and was actually surprised at the timing of the rearrangement. "I thought they were going to do this sooner," Gillott said.

He differentiated Lightbridge from startups and equipment companies that have taken big hits recently. Instead, he said, Lightbridge gets much of its revenue from commissions and royalties when people activate mobile phones, and also through the company's involvement in credit checks and fraud prevention methods used by mobile carriers.

Gillott said that mobile phone usage and subscribership continues to climb, especially in the area of prepaid service, which is a major focus for Lightbridge.

Lightbridge does face some obstacles, Gillott said, primarily in the way the market is shifting toward mobile business in addition to mobile telephone services. "They have to shift their strategy to deal with that," he said, adding that Lightbridge has been pigeonholed by the industry and needs to break out of those preconceptions.

He said the company has a good chance to do that, with a good reputation and strong services.

"They do what they do very well," Gillott said.