Sales of Borland's award-winning, number-one-rated, pure Java cross-platform development environment are expected to soar nationwide as South African schools and colleges update their computer science courses to match emerging new technologies.
And to give sales a further boost Inprise/Borland, the developer of Jbuilder and the popular Delphi suites and its South African distributor, Siltek Distribution Dynamics (SDD), have launched a special promotion whereby students and teaching staff can buy the software at a third of the recommended retail price.
According to Werner Obermeyer, Borland product manager at SDD, South African schools universities and technikons are now beginning to respond to demands to cater for new programming languages and development tools. "Educational establishments have been criticised for not keeping computer science students up to date with emerging technologies such as Java, but this is now beginning to change," he says "The Eastern Cape, for example, is phasing out Turbo Pascal and moving to Java and I'm sure other provinces will follow shortly."
To take advantage of the low-cost offer, students can buy a specially packaged JBuilder 4 Professional - marked "Student Offer Only" at any authorised dealer or computer retail store at a recommended price of just under R700 including VAT. The box does not contain any software, but a registration card is included that has to be completed and sent to the Borland office for verification that the purchaser is a student or a member of teaching staff at a school, college or university. Both full and part time students are eligible. The software, supplied on a CD-ROM, is then sent to the purchaser. "It's the full and latest version of the software that normally retails at over R2000," says Obermeyer. "I can see JBuilder becoming a prescribed product which all students will have to have as demand for visual development tools for creating Pure Java, platform independent database and Internet applications and applets escalates in tertiary organisations."
When it was released in September this year, JBuilder 4 was heralded as the only enterprise productivity environment that supports Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) 1.1 compliant development on Windows, Linux and Solaris platforms. JBuilder 4 significantly speeds time to market for rapidly building e-business applications and deploying them to leading Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) applications servers.
"By making this top-rated product available to South African students at a substantial discount, Borland is laying the foundations of a new generation of software developers, fully trained to meet the needs of tomorrow's e-businesses," says Manoli Rodokanakis, Country Manager, Inprise/Borland South Africa. "The latest version of JBuilder 4 provides a wealth of features, all designed to make Java development easier and faster. It covers the A to Z of Java development. Whether you're doing client-side, server-side or Web-centric Java applications, JBuilder 4 is the perfect Java development tool," he says.
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SDD
Siltek Distribution Dynamics (SDD), the focused IT company in the Siltek Technology Chain Group, is South Africa's largest broad-based distributor of information technology. SDD encourages black empowerment opportunities and is the partner of choice of several leading vendors. It distributes a wide range of 'best of breed' hardware and software products, as well as peripherals, components and consumables. SDD configures branded hardware and builds-to-order Xylo, its own range of PCs. With a backbone of 429 staff, SDD has branches in Gauteng, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, East London, Durban, Bloemfontein and Nelspruit. Outside South Africa, the company has partnerships in Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe.
Siltek Limited
Siltek Limited is the leader in the Southern African Information Technology (IT) Supply Chain with projected turnover of R3-billion in the year to end-June 2000. Listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, Siltek comprises several complementary operating divisions, each of which is a dominant player in its niche area.