Gates Showcases Role in Government Gateway

Bill Gates is out on the road again showing off his enterprise software solutions at the fourth annual Microsoft Government Leaders Conference, where more than 400 government officials from 80 nations are meeting this week.

In his address, Microsoft Corp. Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates highlighted the company’s role in helping the British Government achieve Tony Blairs e-government initiative.

Dubbed “the Government Gateway,” the new Microsoft .NET Enterprise Server solution is an XML-based portal that acts as the centralized registration service for all e-government services in the United Kingdom.

“The goal of the Government Gateway project is to provide our citizens and businesses with a powerful set of tools for interacting and exchanging secure transactions with government institutions,” said Andrew Pinder, e-envoy for the U.K. government. “Today, the Government Gateway project is bringing real value to our most demanding and precious resource: our citizens.”

The government portal, part of Blair’s new e-government initiative of having 100 percent of government transactions online by 2005, is designed to connect the 200 central and 482 local government institutions with the United Kingdom’s 60 million citizens and 3 million businesses.

“The U.K. government is taking the lead in leveraging the resources of the digital economy to empower the millions of citizens and businesses it governs,” said Chris Atkinson, vice president of .NET Enterprise Solutions at Microsoft. “In 15 weeks, Microsoft and the .NET Enterprise Servers brought Tony Blair’s ambitious e-government vision to reality.”

The British Government, in the future, plans to provide citizens with a number of other new e-services, including passport and vehicle registration renewals.