Founding Ciber was founded in 1974 by three individuals, one of whom would remain with the company and guide its fortunes for its crucial first two decades. Of the three original founders of Ciber, Bobby G. Stevenson emerged as the key figure in Ciber's history, shaping a start-up computer
consulting firm into a leading national force by the 1990s, when the computer consulting industry was generating more than $30 billion worth of business a year. A graduate of Texas Tech University, Stevenson spent the years between his formal education and the formation of Ciber working as a programmer analyst for International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) and LTV Steel in Houston. By the early 1970s, when Stevenson was in his early 30s, he and two other colleagues decided to make a go of it on their own and organized Ciber, an acronym for "consultants in business, engineering, and research." At the time, Stevenson and Ciber's other co-founders saw a need in the corporate world for specialised, technical assistance in keeping pace with the technological advances in computer hardware and computer software. The trio saw an opportunity to provide contract computer consulting services to clients lacking either in the resources or the expertise to use the power of computers in their day-to-day operations. Through Ciber, the founders tapped into a market that would grow explosively in the decades ahead. Few realized at the time how important computers would become to the business world. As the use of computers increased and wave after wave of computer innovations swept away yesterday's technological vanguard, the need for sophisticated service firms like Ciber to implement the frequently indecipherable technology of tomorrow grew exponentially. They had offices in
Huntsville, Alabama,
Greenwood Village, Colorado, Clients whose equipment Ciber had tested include
Diebold Election Systems. In October 2006, former Maryland state legislator
Cheryl Kagan anonymously received a package containing computer disks with source code apparently created by Diebold Election Systems that was used by Maryland during the
2004 elections. The disks had logos from Ciber and
Wyle, with both companies denying ownership. Ciber was accredited under federal government guidelines from 2002, but as of 2007, they had not been certified for updated guidelines set in 2005. The lab had lost its accreditation during the summer of 2006, with the
Election Assistance Commission (EAC) finding that Ciber did not have a standard
quality assurance procedure, that the lab had insufficient time for testing, and that the lab risked depending on the voting machine vendors for testing. However, the EAC did not share its report with the public or election officials until
The New York Times shared it in January 2007,
Avi Rubin warned that voting machine systems that Ciber had certified were previously used in elections, and Ciber losing its accreditation "calls into question those systems that they tested".
The New York State Board of Elections had also suspended Ciber's license later that month. In June 2007, the EAC voted against interim accreditation for Ciber, citing that the company did not tell the commission in time that two key employees had left to join a competitor, Wyle. == References ==