The Register picked up the first LA going live on the Government Gateway – Shepway. The first of many in the next few months in fact. It’s good news for two reasons – (i) LA’s handle perhaps 80% of government’s interactions with the population and most of those are more regular than the annual central interations; the availability of more transactions that need to be done more often is one of things that I think will drive adoption of e-government and (ii) Shepway are the first people to use a SUN DIS box.
I don’t agree at all with Tim Holyoake’s anti-Microsoft quote about a “bag of bits”, but it’s about par for the course. What is important is that the arrival of new vendors of DIS (and there are more to come) indicate a market that has mass – because if there were no takers, then there’d be no need for more companies to be in the space. With one company there were too many restrictions so I’m delighted that Sun have entered with Software AG as their partner and can’t wait to see them deliver more instances.
I’m behind on where I’d like to be with LA’s and Shepway taking the plunge is a great sign. Over the next few months there should be both more services available and more and more LAs moving onto the platform.