The Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT)

The Indian Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) at Hyderabad is an initiative of the global IT industry in association with the government of Andhra Pradesh. It was set up with the aim of pooling the strength and resources of the best companies with facilitation and support of the government. The institute is designed to play the role that Stanford University plays in the Silicon Valley. The main objective of the IIIT is to produce IT professionals capable of facing the complex challenges of the future. In order to achieve this, the state government initiated the institute with the help of leading IT companies to promote quality IT education. These companies have set up their training schools at the IIIT campus. The IIIT commenced its main academic programme in the year 1998 with a four-year under-graduate program in information technology. The education programs are designed by the IIIT and these schools impart training in various modules of these programs. The companies that set up schools at the IIIT are IBM, Metamor Global Solutions, Motorola, Oracle Software and Satyam Computers.

Presently the IBM School of Enterprise wide Computing, Metamor School of Excellence and Oracle School of Technology are functional. The Motorola School of communication technology, which is opening shortly, will be offering courses in communication technology to the students of the IIIT. These schools ,apart from supporting the IIIT in their education programs, offer courses on various latest technologies.

IBM SCHOOL OF ENTERPRISE-WIDE SOLUTIONS

This type of School is first of its kind in Asia by IBM. Right from its inception IBM has been involved in providing quality IT education at different locations around the world. The school was established with a view to supporting the training programs that are designed by IIIT and imparting quality training to students apart from employees, clients and customers of IBM. Presently the IBM School is providing training on the S390 and AS/400 platforms. A course on eBusiness is also provided, based on the customers demands. This prepare the school prepares the curricula for the eBusiness courses conducted by various IBM certified institutes across India. The Students enrolling here are fresh graduates, employees of IBM and professionals sponsored by various corporate houses. The focus is on providing quality IT education comparable to standards set by educational institutions anywhere in the world.

The IBM center at the IIIT, Hyderabad includes 16,000 sq.ft work area, four lecture halls with all the required facilities like overhead projectors (OHPs), Internet connectivity, one S390 system, three AS/400 midrange systems, one RS6000 system and 80 Pentium -based nodes networked with a PC server. It has a library with all the latest books and magazines on IT.

The School is presently offering short term courses in mainframe platforms. The students enrolling for these courses are paid a stipend of Rs.2000 per month for the course duration of six weeks. The quality of the training imparted here is maintained by members certified by IBM. Three faculty members of the school are specialists in AS/400.About five batches of the S390 programme and 10 batches of AS/400 program have completed. This is apart from around 500 professionals sponsored by various corporate houses, who have completed the courses from this school. There are plenty of jobs available and there is a scarcity of professionals with certificates.

The school also provides opportunities to AS/400 professionals across India to visit the facility and work on projects for a period of six months as a part of an on the job training program.

Motorala school

Motorola has designed the school in such a manner that it would provide complete training in communications technology. The same model is adopted by other centres also. The school has been set up on the IIIT campus in around 20,000 sq.ft space. It has spacious classrooms and facilities to demonstrate new products developed by the company and for interactive sessions.

Presently, the school is conducting theory classes on communication technology for final year students of the IIIT. Apart from this, it will also train the students of the IIIT on advanced communications technology like second-generation(2G) and third- generation (3G) technologies. A training centre for cellular infrastructure and a Wireless Application Protocal(WAP) lab would be developed at the school and short courses on WAP, Blutetooth, etc, would be provided.

ORACLE SCHOOL OF SOFTWARE TECHNOLOGY

Oracle's contribution to the IIIT, Hyderabad, is the Oracle School of Software Technology. The main objective of setting up this was to provide advanced training on Oracle technologies to professionals sponsored by corporate houses and the government.

The courses at the Oracle school are broadly categorized into two types. Core technologies and Enterprise Resource Planning(ERP). Under the Core technologies, the school offers Oracle Database Administration (DBA), Oracle Developer and JDeveloper couses. The JDeveloper course includes Java with Oracle interface. The Oracle Developer and Designer courses are offered only to professionals sponsored by corporate houses. The ERP courses includes Oracle Applications Release 11 and 11i with Java component. The school caters only to the needs of professionals with prior experience in the same technology.

The courses offered are all full-time in nature and vary from 14 to 45 working days in duration. Only the professionals are selected by means of an interview.The school provides online training in their ultramodern campus. The facilities includes three classrooms, with a capacity to accommodate 50, 24, 24 students respectively. It has two servers, around 45 systems with hi-end configuration, like 2GB RAM, 80 GB hard disk, Wide area Network (WAN) connectivity, etc. All courses conform to the Oracle worldwide standards. After completing the programs, students undergo a compulsory workshop, which includes a project for the Oracle India Development Centre (IDC).

PSINet school

The PSINet School of Excellence (PSE) at the IIIT, Hyderabad, was set up by PSINet Consulting Solutions Limited to focus its approach on research, learning and training. PSINet is a member of the governing council of IIIT along with IBM, Oracle, Satyam and Motorala.

The school is presently training students on the Object-Oriented (OO) Technologies module for the IIIT under graduate and post-graduate Programmes. It also covers personality development topics like presentation skills communication skills, public speaking ,resume making, etc, by the team of human recourse professionals from
PSINet Consulting Solutions. PSE is also a Cisco Academy Training Centre (CATC). It trains the instructors of the regional Cisco academies, which provides Cisco authorized training Programmes. It also has a classroom-cum-seminar hall and a lab for the Cisco training progam, which can be utilised for other courses also if need arises. The lab at PSE are online (connected to the Internet) to help the students gain hands-on experience.

The school is a Sun authorized Java training institute and offers short-term courses(6 weeks duration) like Core Java, Object Oriented Analysis and Design (OOAD)/Unified Markup Language (UML) and the maximum students intake per batch is 30 students. The faculty members are well versed in all the related topics.

The PSE is also a Sylvan Prometric Authorized Testing Centre. This enables students to give their certification examination also on the same campus.Presently the school has a 64-kbps link with PSINet Consulting Solutions at Hi-Tech city to coordinate its activities. It will soon be procuring a dedicated digital link for the training activities too.