Developer Centre: A boost for South African software development

South African enterprise software developers have been given the opportunity to test drive their applications on some serious tin with the announcement of a fully fledged Developer Centre, the result of a collaboration between Oracle South Africa, Sun Microsystems and Systemsfusion.

The Developer Centre, housed at the Rosebank premises of Oracle ISV, Systemsfusion, includes a Sun Fire E10000 enterprise server with the Solaris Unix operating system, a storage area network and Cisco networking equipment, and a further two Sun V20 64-bit AMD-based servers. The data centre is climate-controlled and power protected.

Resources in the Developer Centre are available at a very low cost to individuals or teams of developers; furthermore, the centre will also be made available to corporate development teams and to businesses that may need additional capacity during times of peak demand and to test proof of concepts (POC) before implementation.

Bev Scott, ISV channel manager at Oracle South Africa, says the centre is a huge boost for local software developers. "Historically it has been an obstacle for developers to get access to these kinds of resources to stress and functional testing, demo/technology showcase facilities and evaluate enterprise applications. The cost of such technology is considerable and it is usually for mission-critical tasks, making it very difficult for developers to explore fully the potential of their applications and experiment with Oracle and Sun technology," she explains.

"This investment in the centre is our contribution towards helping local software developers compete on an international level," continues Scott.

Jos Nickmans, channel manager at Sun Microsystems sub-Saharan Africa, says SA has many good developers who need access to appropriate facilities to maximise their talent.

"This centre has been established as a software engineering centre which will serve as a hub for developers to work together and exchange ideas, while having the power of a proper enterprise environment at their disposal," he says.

Nickmans said that with enterprises demanding reliability, scalability, security and performance from their software systems, it is crucial that developers working to provide innovative solutions have a facility to test, tune and evaluate their applications. "Over the years we have had many requests from ISVs to have access to our hardware - but this equipment is extremely costly; it simply made sense for us to encourage technology development by making the equipment available at a central location, where developers can not only use the equipment but also share ideas and work together," he adds.

Nevo Hadas, MD of Systemsfusion, adds that many developers lack he ability to take their products to market. "That starts with the ability to test products on an enterprise platform - an issue that has, for the first time, been comprehensively addressed with the opening of the Developer Centre. In addition to the hardware, support will be available to developers to help them drive successful innovations into the market, by drawing on the expertise of established organisations such as ourselves, Oracle and Sun.

"We're encouraging developers to use the centre both by visiting the physical location as well as accessing the resources remotely. With this facility, we believe we are taking a significant step forward into assisting local developers to start working with emerging technology, to their benefit and for the benefit of local technology users," concludes Hadas.