Latvians - 1, Space Junk - 0

Blasting apart the hydrazine drooling, brain-dead monster piece of space junk (intended once to be a surveillance satellite) over the Pacific was a deed that must in part be credited to two Latvians -- one the "godfather" of the Latvian IT industry, Janis (yes, a male name) Gobins and the late (I hope I am not wrong) Visvaldis Mangulis.
Janis Gobins, a software specialist, designed the methods by which the software driving the AEGIS naval anti-aircraft missile defense system was written in the mid-1970s (based on the mainframe= today's entry level handheld computer technology of the time). It would be wrong to say that The Godfather (as some in Latvian IT circles affectionately call him) wrote the hyper-complex AEGIS target tracking and management system, but he did prove that a) it could be designed and written b) described how the task to be done. Teams of software engineers took it from there.
The other Latvian-American, recently deceased, was Mangulis, who was behind the design of the phased-array radar that is still a feature of all AEGIS cruisers. He apparently got the idea from earlier work with sonar.

Lattelecom eyeing Pionit, a stealth IT company?

Lattelecom, in the midst of an MBO, is already looking beyond that for forging closer ties with selected IT companies. The most interesting of these may be Pionit AG  in Germany, where one of the chief "assets" is Mikus Grasmanis, a Latvian software engineer and one of the key inventors of GRADE, a business process analysis toolkit developed initially by the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics at the University of Latvia in the early 1990s. Also behind Pionit is Janis Gobins, the "godfather"  of the modern Latvian IT industry (Software House Riga, which later morphed and merger into Dati and Exigen/merged with Dati/).

Pionit was founded in 2006 and is still kind of a stealth company, but apparently looking to do sophisticated projects in business process management and the "industrialization" of software development projects. Pionit is the foothold in Germany that Lattelecom's new business directions in outsourcing and IT solutions need and have been looking for.  Valdis Lokenbahs,  formerly a major honcho at Dati, also recently joined Lattelecom. One reason he was recruited may have been his experience setting up a Dati operation in Germany and his ideas about building what he called a global software factory (assembling resources in a number of countries to optimally produce a software solution).

I predict that, by the end of 2008, Pionit (which already advertises its cooperation with Lattelecom) may become one of the first acquisitions of  the newly privatized Lattelecom.  Indeed, Nils Melngailis, Lattelecom CEO, strongly hinted that Lattelecom will grow in the future by major acquisitions, even of companies of similar size as Lattelecom at present. He was speaking at an annual conference for Lattelecom business customers and partners on September 19.