Sun Microsystems appoints SQL Star as its education partner

Global IT major Sun Microsystems has appointed SQL Star International Limited as its authorised education partner in India.

An agreement to this effect was signed between the two companies, SQL Star executive chairman, N R Ganti, announced here on Thursday.

As per the agreement, Ganti told newspersons, SQL Star will offer Java courses to students in its eight training centres spread across the country.

In addition, the company will set up Sun Learning Centres in Hyderabad and Chennai over the next eight months. These learning centres will conduct training on Sun Solaris and Sun Java Enterprise System.

According to Ganti, the demand for various Java training and certification courses has increased multifold over the last few years with Java gaining in popularity among developers of enterprise applications, web services as well as mobile applications. There are over six lakh software developers in India and over half of them use Java-related software development.

Apart from having eight branches in India, SQL Star has wholly-owned subsidiaries in USA, UK and Singapore. The company, which has an equity base of Rs 12 crore, posted a turnover of Rs 28 crore and a gross profit of Rs 4 lakh for the year ending December 2004.

Ganti, who took over the management of the company two months back, said that the company's turnover and profit were expected to go up to Rs 40 crore and Rs 1 crore respectively in the current year.

He said that the company, which raised Rs 10 crore through preferential allotment of shares, had also issued 1 crore warrants of Rs 40 each to raise an amount of Rs 40 crore. The warrants would be converted into 1 crore equity shares after 18 months. Post conversion of warrants into equity shares, the public shareholding in the company would decline from the existing 45 per cent to about 35 per cent.