IBM has invested R300 000 in the development of an Open Computing Centre, to benefit the community of KwaZulu-Natal, including academia, entrepreneurs, public organisations and businesses.
This latest deployment adds to the two existing centres at the universities of Cape Town and Wits - altogether making up an investment in excess of R1 million.
IBM's Open Computing Centres are resource facilities fully equipped with a network of workstations (at least 10 PCs), a variety of servers, and open source software such as Linux, WebSphere, DB2 and Apache.
"Through these resource centres, the company is giving academia, business partners, independent software vendors (ISVs), entrepreneurs, and small and medium enterprises free access to the latest technologies, which can be used for research, as well as generation of new business ideas and solutions," said Maureen Baird, IBM SA's executive for business development, Winback and solutions.
The Durban Open Computing Centre is housed at the facilities of SmartXchange, a business incubator that aims to drive the growth of new businesses and the economy in the province through ICT. The centre can also be used for demonstration of proof of concepts, infrastructure solutions, ISV applications and academic research.
"Together with the professional support of IBM and SmartXchange, this centre promises to provide the academic community in KwaZulu-Natal with high-quality, state-of-the-art facilities that will encourage and enhance intra-academic and academia-wide collaborations that were not previously possible," said Prof Manoj Maharaj, University of KwaZulu-Natal's head of the School of Information Systems and Technology.
He says that, properly managed, this facility will provide a fertile environment for the germination of new ideas and applications. This will further drive the expansion of the open source movement and ultimately make affordable computing, together with its attendant benefits, accessible to all, he notes.
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