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Silicon Valley Firm To Open D.C. Office
by Bara Vaida
Though Silicon Valley is still hurting economically, at least one company is expanding. Sybase, the Dublin, Calif., database software company is opening a government affairs office this week in Washington, D.C., and it will be headed by Edward Hearst, a former Capitol Hill staffer who left Washington three years ago for the West Coast.
Sybase already has a 250-person sales office in Bethesda, Md., to manage the firm's federal contracts with agencies such as the General Services Administration. "Opening a Washington, D.C., office is part of Sybase's overall commitment to working in the federal market and to playing the role of good public citizen," Hearst said of the new office.
Hearst spent six years as a senior counsel on the House Commerce Committee when Thomas Bliley, R-Va., was chairman. During that time, he worked on technology policy, international trade and telecommunications. Before that, he worked at the FCC in the cable bureau and at the State Department as a senior policy adviser. Hearst left Washington when Bliley retired in 2000 and became vice president for worldwide business development at the Pleasanton, Calif.-based software company Commerce One.
Hearst said Sybase expects to be active in lobbying on e-government, federal procurement, homeland security, intellectual property and trade, particularly as it relates to China. The firm, which will remain a member of the Business Software Alliance, the Information Technology Association of America, and the Software and Information Industry Association, has no immediate plans to hire outside lobbying firms or create a political action committee.
Sybase's president, John Chen, is traveling to D.C. this week to speak at the McGraw Hill Homeland Security conference on Thursday. Sybase is also the first Silicon Valley high-tech firm to open a Washington office since Siebel Systems did in mid-2001.
AeA Members To Lobby On Exports, Other Issues
AeA is hosting its spring policy meeting this week for its company executives, and instead of holding a board meeting, the tech association is sending its members to Capitol Hill.
About 40 of the executives from companies such as Cisco Systems, DRS Technology, Filenet, Intel, Solectron, Sun Microsystems and Xilinx, are dividing into threes, with each group to focus on a specific policy item to discuss with lawmakers. One group will focus on export controls, another on the accounting rules for employee stock options and a third on economic stimulus.
"We did this three years ago ... and our members said they felt like they were participating in the democratic process ... which they really liked, so we are doing it again," AeA President William Archey said in an interview last week.
Archey said that the visits, set for Thursday, will include a mix of Republicans and Democrats and that some of the meetings may "get spirited," as they have in the past. In particular, the export-control issue is controversial because while high-tech firms want relief from controls on exports of tech products, some lawmakers fear that such a move could be a national security risk. Three years ago, AeA's members successfully lobbied for the United States to establish permanent normal trade relations with China.
This Thursday, AeA also is hosting its annual congressional event, featuring Motorola CEO Christopher Galvin as a keynote speaker.
High-Tech Outreach In The Senate
Senate Democratic outreach to the high-tech sector has become the forte of Ted Zegers, according to a spokesman for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., who is now chairing the Senate Democratic Steering Committee.
Zegers, a top policy adviser to Senate Minority Leader Thomas Daschle, D-S.D., who also handles budget and Social Security issues, replaces Josh Ackil, who left his tech outreach job in April to join the Information Technology Industry Council.
Meanwhile, Senate Republican High-Tech Task Force Chairman John Ensign, R-Nev., has hired Michael Sullivan as legislative assistant to handle high-tech policy. He replaces Bryan Cunningham, who left the post to join Cisco Systems. Sullivan currently handles legislative issues for Rep. Mary Bono, R-Calif.
High-tech sources said that other staffers handling GOP outreach to the high-tech sector include Jesse Wadhams, who works on the task force and Alex Vogel, who is counsel to Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.
Lobbyist May Become GOP Chairman
Ed Gillespie, co-founder of the bipartisan lobbying firm Quinn & Gillespie, is under consideration to be named chairman of the Republican National Committee, Roll Call reported last week. He would replace current chairman Marc Racicot, who is poised to fill a key role in President Bush's 2004 re-election campaign.
Over the past several years, Quinn & Gillespie has represented high-tech clients, including Cisco Systems, Microsoft and the high-tech lobbying group TechNet.
White House political adviser Karl Rove will be making the final decision, according to the Roll Call story. Gillespie also told the paper that he has not been asked to take the job but has made it clear that would he serve in any capacity to re-elect Bush.
Bush Renews Tenure Of Tech Advisers
Bush last week renewed an executive order naming new members to the President's Information Technology Advisory Committee (PITAC), a group that was active under President Clinton and that recommended increases in federal investment in IT research and development.
The PITAC co-chairmen are Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce.com, and Edward Lazowska, chairman of the University of Washington's computer science department. The other panelists include:
- Ruzena Bajcsy, director of the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society, which is located at the University of California at Berkeley
- J. Carter Beese, a former SEC commissioner;
- Pedro Celis, a software architect at Microsoft;
- Bernard Daines, CEO of Worldwide Packets;
- Patricia Evans, a professor at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute;
- Manuel Fernandez, retired chairman of the Gartner Group;
- Luis Fiallo, vice president for e-solutions at Teleglobe;
- Jose Marie Griffiths, a faculty member of the University of Pittsburgh's library and information services department;
- William Hannigan, CEO of Sabre;
- Jonathan Javitt, a senior adjunct fellow at the Potomac Institute;
- Judith Klavans, director of Columbia University's Center for Research in Information Access;
- F. Thomson Leighton, a co-founder of Akamai Technologies;
- Harold Mortazavian, a professor at University of California at Los Angeles's electrical engineering department;
- Randy Mott, chief information office at Dell Computer;
- Peter Neupert, CEO of Yahoo;
- Eli Noam, a professor at the Columbia University Institute for Tele-Information;
- David Patterson, a professor of computer science at UC-Berkeley;
- Alice Quintanilla, president of Fiore Industries;
- Daniel Reed, director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the National Computational Science Alliance at the University of Illinois;
- Eugene Spafford, director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security at Purdue University;
- David Staelin, a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology;
- Peter Tippett, chief technology officer at TruSecure;
- and Geoffrey Yang, a venture capitalist at Repoint Ventures in Silicon Valley.
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