Jadesada Kraisingkorn, the country manager for software at IBM Thailand, said the cooperation was under the IBM Academic Initiative 2006, which was a global strategy to help each country develop IT personnel.

KMUTT is the first university with which IBM has signed a five-year memorandum of understanding. Under the agreement, IBM will provide infrastructure support as well as educational resources to allow the university to train its students to serve the industry. The support will also include free downloads of software including DB2, Lotus, Rational, Tivoli, WebSphere and open-source software. The project's value is Bt170 million.

IBM will also provide support to the university through the IBM Scholars Programme, which offers open standards, open source, IBM technologies, training and course materials for free.

However, KMUTT will also invest Bt16 million in hardware infrastructure and maintenance needs for the five-year programme. Prasert Kanthamanon, KMUTT's senior associate dean for administrative affairs at the School of Information Technology, said the initiative will enable the university to keep pace with emerging technologies.

The IBM Academic Initiative is a global programme to collaborate with educators in teaching students the open-standards skills necessary to compete and keep pace with changes in the IT workplace. "IBM will continue to work with schools that support open standards and seek to use open source and IBM technologies for teaching purposes, both directly and virtually via the Web," said Jadesada.

She said the company planned to work with other universities on the programme, expecting it would involve around 10 projects by the end of the year.

KMUTT has also set up the Vitrual IT Playground Project to offer students a virtual private server. Each student can work independently, on their own server, to modify, reboot or tune the system, without having any impact on other students who are using the server.

Jirapan Boonnoon

The Nation