Tech Link Newsletter

March 2009

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MTBC Pushed Legislative Agenda in Austin During Tech Week

MTBC Leadership Meets House Speaker and Lt. Governor

With the 81st Legislative Session is full swing in Austin, MTBC leadership lost no time in making sure that both the House and Senate leadership were made aware of the MTBC Key legislative priorities for this session.

Tech Week
MTBC Board Chair Ed Shumaker, who is Texas Region Site Executive for Cisco Systems, led the contingent of technology companies from the DFW area joined by partnering organizations including the American Electronics Association (now known as Tech America), Texas Healthcare & Bioscience Institute (THBI) and TechNet Texas to kick off Tech Week events in Austin. Activities included a reception for both legislators and Tech Week participants and special briefings by Senator Florence Shapiro of Plano, Chair of the Senate Education Committee and a member of the Senate Finance Committee, as well as State Representative Mark Strama of Austin, Chair of the House Committee on Technology, Economic Development and Workforce.

The MTBC was honored by both the House (offered by North Texas State Representative Dan Branch of Dallas) and the Senate (offered by Senator Florence Shapiro) with resolutions recognizing the ongoing efforts and key initiatives in addition to acknowledging the many achievements of the MTBC organization.

Meeting with New House Speaker and Lt. Gov.
The highlight of the visit to Austin was an opportunity to meet with both the newly elected Speaker of the House, Joe Straus of San Antonio, and with the Lt. Governor David Dewhurst, who heads the Senate.

Visit to UT Austin EDGE
Also on the agenda in Austin was a visit and luncheon at UT Austin’s EDGE facility. EDGE, an acronym for Excellence in Distributed Global Environments, joined the MTBC last year. The program is directed by Dr. Suzanne Barber, who regularly attends our MTBC activities. Dr. Barber’s expertise covers distributed, intelligent agent-based systems and tools for the distributed software engineering lifecycle. In summary, EDGE fosters collaboration between University researchers and leaders from industry and government in order to bring greater understanding to real world issues. EDGE integrates research in the Departments of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering and is expanding to include areas such as Law, Communications and the Social Sciences in order to comprehensively address the complex challenges of distributed engineering and computation.

Key priorities
With the approval of the MTBC Board of Directors, the MTBC Governmental Relations Committee, chaired this year by Doug Moore, Sr. VP Sales with Fujitsu Network Communications, selected the following as keypriorities for the 81st legislative session:

1. Pass re-enactment of an R&D Tax Credit against the Texas “gross margins” tax.
2. Pass a new sales tax exemption on the purchase of R&D equipment in Texas.
3. Appropriate $203.5 million to the Texas Emerging Technology Fund for the 2009-2010 biennium and approve changes to the legislation to allocate more of the fund’s resources for effective portfolio management of the state’s investments in emerging technology companies.

In addition, they asked the legislators to support these actions as well:
1. Provide greater state funding to create more tier-one research universities in Texas.
2. Implement the recommendations of the Governor’s Competitiveness Council.
3. Develop and implement expanded curriculum providing additional graduation paths within the 4 x 4 educational guidelines.

Other members of the MTBC Government Relations Committee include:
Theodore Baroody, Patent Attorney, Haynes and Boone LLP
Clem Maddox, Franchise & Government Affairs, Time Warner Cable Business Class
Gray Mayes, Director, Public Affairs, Texas Instruments
Julia Pitlik, Sr. Director of Marketing, Fujitsu Network Communications
Ed Shumaker, Texas Region Site Executive, Cisco Systems, Inc.
Bill Sproull, President/CEO, Metroplex Technology Business Council
Richard Tworek, General Manager, Next Generation Unified Networks, Nortel

To learn more about the activities of the MTBC Governmental Relations Committee, contact Molly Ulmer at the MTBC office, 972.792.2861 or molly@metroplextbc.org

Tech Link is a monthly publication of the Metroplex Technology Business Council Communications Department.

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