NCC Developments

[Daniel Karrenberg <]

Deat colleagues,

There have been a couple of developments I want to inform you about
quickly.  Ambrose Magee has started work as a network engineer in the
Systems&Software group.  Ambrose will take over the maintenance and
development of the database software.  We are still looking for more
network engineers. 

We have made intesive efforts to recruit a manager for the
Systems&Software group.  Given the high requirements we have and the big
demand for such people we have not been successful.  At the same time we
succeeded to interest Paul Ridley to join us on the business side.  Paul
is finishing a business degree and as part of that is helping us with
developing costing and charging models.  In the process of this project
he has demonstrated considerable insight and made very good suggestions.
Prior to his studies Paul has served for seven years in the British Army
where in addition to more than 1000 hours of helicopter flying he has
aquired a lot of relevant skills such as accounting and management. 
When this became apparent we reconsidered responsibilities and our
business manager Carol Orange was prepared to take over the
responsibilities of Systems&Software manager, a job for which she is
fully qualified both by education and experience.  Consequently I am
very happy to announce that Paul will join us as business manager on
August 19th while Carol will take up her new responsibilities at the
same date.  Both will be able to assume their responsibilities
immediately.  This is possible because Paul already knows a great deal
about his new responsibilities from working on the charging model
project and Carol has already been involved in systems and software
area.  This means that the NCC will have the complete and stable
management team we need. 

I'l like to remind contributors that their annual meeting will be held
on September 11th at Schiphol airport Amsterdam.  Formal invitations and
relevant documents will be circulated before August 15th.  The documents
will include:
	
	- 1995 RIPE NCC Annual Report
	- 1997 RIPE NCC Activities & Expenditure
	- 1997 RIPE NCC Revenue & Charging

A few operational remarks: The new RIPE NCC WEB site has been launched
and reactions are quite positive (http://www.ripe.net/).  An improved
whois service has been lauched.  The database update service will be
improved significantly in the next few days.  The 'wait-queue' for
requests to registration services has been reduced to zero, so 
registration services requests are presently handled with little delay.

Given all the above I have decided that it is possible to have an NCC
office outing this year, the first one since three years. This means
that our office will be closed tomorrow, July 24th. Of course we will
monitor our service machines remotely as usual and cover emergencies. 
Normal services will resume Thursday August 25th. 

If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Regards

Daniel Karrenberg
RIPE NCC Manager