Council Member Bruce Tatro, who called for the first special meeting on Oct. 15 that was also canceled due to lack of a quorum, said on Wednesday that a council member who had signed the written request for the second special meeting had a change of heart and did not show up for the special meeting on Oct. 29.
Tatro, in an e-mail sent on Oct. 23, had said eight members of the City Council -- enough to establish a quorum -- signed an official request to hold the Oct. 29 special meeting.
Under the contract, signed last June, IAT has supplied the city with SimHouston -- a Web-based suite of office applications that subscribers can use to create, edit and store documents, such as resumes. The SimHouston suite is already available, for free, to subscribers at city libraries.
More than 63,000 people have already used SimHouston to create and store 250,000 documents on IAT's servers, according to the city's CIO, Richard Lewis.
Houston's contract with IAT, spearheaded by the city's former CIO, Denny Piper, has drawn criticism from members of the City Council, and there are allegations that Piper may have violated state bidding laws by rigging the contract so that only IAT could have won it.
The company has fulfilled its obligations under the contract with respect to the first phase of the contract, which called for deploying the SimHouston product to city libraries, Lewis said.
The contract's second phase calls for the SimHouston suite to be deployed to city agencies, eventually replacing standard software, such as Microsoft Office, on employees' desktop computers.
