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Oracle begins NC drive in India

The first of these centres will be opened at the Oracle Open World to be held at New Delhi between November 10 and 14.

Permanent centres will also be set up around 10 locations with Oracle partners including IBM India and Digital Equipment India Limited.

T O D A Y

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Network computing had not really caught on in India, admitted T Srinivasan, director, applications and industries, Oracle Software India. "People need to understand that network computers can coexist with personal computers and that they can really bring down their deployment costs by using NCs," he claims.

Oracle Open World will be an attempt to educate software developers and IT managers in this direction.

Oracle is also stepping up investments in education. It is committed to setting up the 'Oracle School for Advanced Software Technology' at the Indian Institute of Information Technology in Hyderabad. Oracle is also talking to the governments of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka which are planning similar institutes.

Investment in education pays off for technology firms such as Oracle since the availability of manpower trained in their software could influence a buying decision.

Oracle partly attributes its success in the local RDBMS (relational database management system) market to the high level of familiarity with Oracle products among Indian software engineers.

Oracle offers three levels of training to its corporate customers: Instructor-led training, computer-based tutorials and through the Oracle Learning Architecture, a Web- based learning platform.

The last is not currently available in India but is likely to be launched soon. According to S V Krishna, general manager, education, Oracle Software, implementing Internet-based training will not be a problem in India in spite of the small number of Net connections since the OLA is targeted at corporations which are more likely to have ready access to the Net.

Oracle is also experimenting with satellite-based distance education. Using the Indira Gandhi Open University's distance education centres, Oracle personnel are linked up live with 120 clients in around eight cities. Two-way video and audio are used to simulate the classroom environment.

- Compiled from the Indian media

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