Anna University campus to have information technology park

Anna University plans to create an exclusive Information Technology Park on its campus for research and development with the involvement of multi-national IT majors.

The University is also looking at using open source software to provide cost-effective solutions to the colleges that need to constantly upgrade their systems and software.

Vice-Chancellor D. Viswanathan, who was inaugurating a workshop on `Free and Liber Open Source Systems (FLOSS)' in the Department of Computer Sciences on Wednesday, said the facility would cost Rs. 12 crores to Rs. 15 crores and would concentrate on inter-disciplinary research that would benefit non-IT departments in the University.

He said the proposal needed approval from the University Syndicate. Once the permission was received, the IT park would be ready in 12 to 18 months.

"I saw in some private colleges, very modern IT parks built with the collaboration of multi-nationals and IT companies. I felt the University too required such a modern centre with international facilities. The IT companies could be brought in and be asked to present industry problems and thus foster R&D in the park," Dr. Viswanathan said.

Facilitating interaction

He said there was very little interaction among the different departments. The park could address this. Inter-disciplinary problems could be solved or specific software addressing the needs of non-IT departments such as mechanical engineering could be developed.

He said the department heads and researchers could meet on the first Saturday of each month to pose their problems.

Highlighting the cost factor involved for the 240-odd affiliated colleges each time they had to upgrade or change their software and systems, he said open source software could solve this problem. The University's AU-KBC Research Centre was working with open source providers such as Collabnet to find cost-effective solutions.

He said the University had mooted a consortium model to set up an IT facility to address the computing requirements of affiliated colleges. The colleges would contribute about Rs. 60 crores for this facility, also to come up in the university campus.

Brian Behlendorf, Chief Technology Officer, Collabnet, gave an overview of how a company could roll out an open source system. It was a concept not only about less cost but it was more about discovering the real potential of collaborative working by developers across different centres and sharing solutions. These experiences went to repositories that could be reused for a new rollout or improved during version upgrades.

He said industry records showed that nearly 45 per cent of software projects were cancelled and these failures occurred due to very slow feedback loops, high underlying technology churn and poor documentation of prior systems and the new requirements.

But in a collaborative venture, the chances of long-term success was high. In such collaboration there was a simple, underlying principle: "If you need something fixed in your software, then produce or share a source code," he said.