Rational Software Picks

Bangalore firm as ally

The US-based $308 million Rational Software Corporation has chosen Bangalore-based Supercomputer Education and Research Centre (SERC) for launching its unique `SEED' programme in India with a view to promote good software engineering skills.

Rational's Indian subsidiary, Rational Software Corporation (India) Pvt Ltd, which leads in software development tools, is investing over $ 1.5 lakh for launching its `SEED' programme at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), where SERC is housed.

"The SEED (software engineering for educational development) programme represents a long-term commitment from Rational Corporation to help ensure the adoption of good software engineering discipline in the academic community," Rational, one of the top 20 independent software company in the world, stated.

 

According to N Balakrishnan, chairman, SERC, Rational's SEED programme offered a complete integrated development platform for software development using the object-oriented paradigm.

IISc, which offers a wide range of courses as part of ME/MSc and Ph D programmes dealing with various aspects of software engineers, will benefit from SEED programme which will be used by these course students to develop their projects, he said. The Centre also plans to use SEED products for high end software development.

According to John Stewart, managing director, Rational North Asia Pacific, the company's SEED programme intended to help the academic community in solving their financial constraints in making state-of-the-art software technology available for hands-on use by students. "This will make them keep pace with the industry," said Stewart.

"Rational designed its SEED programme to help colleges and universities at the forefront of software technology by making the world's most sophisticated software-engineering tools available free of charge," he said.

SERC, which has been a catalyst for computing and computer based research and education at the national level and in particular at the IISc, has collaborations with several IBM, HP, Intel, LG, Fujitsu, DOE, DST, etc., It has also undertaken a large number of sponsored research projects for government departments like space and defence.

The SEED programme offers `Apex Ada,' an integrated environment for designing, developing, and maintaining complex applications, is used as an industrial strength tool for use on demanding software projects. On Rational's plans in India, Stewart said the company planned to expand its activities in India by doubling its software engineers. The company looked at India both for sourcing software and marketing, he added.