SUN MICROSYSTEMS AND IIT DELHI SET UP CENTRE OF EXCELLENCE FOR E-GOVERNANCE IN INDIA

Centre to carry out research in related areas of E-governance

New Delhi, December 29, 2008 — Sun Microsystems India Pvt Ltd and Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) jointly announced the set up of the Sun-IIT Delhi Centre of Excellence in E-governance at the IIT Delhi campus. The centre is an outcome of the MoU signed by Sun and IIT in September 2006.

The objective behind setting up this Centre of E-Governance is to carry out research in related areas of E-governance and to educate the stakeholders who broadly include senior government officials, defence officials and other people who are a part of this E-governance system and thus contribute to better social infrastructure, lowered cost of running the government, enhanced security and thereby better quality of life for the citizens of India. Further, the Centre will also showcase latest technology innovations and solutions to the Government and also evaluate the impact of technology on the government and society and formulate appropriate IT policy papers.

The centre was recently inaugurated by Kiran Karnik (former President of Nasscom), F. C. Kohli (Father of Indian Software Industry), Richard Stallman (Father of Free Software), Mr. A. S. Rao (Addl Secretary of E-Governance, Govt of India), Mr. Y. K. Sharma (Dy. Director General of NIC) and Prof Jayati Ghosh (member National Knowledge) as part of the International Conference on E-governance that concluded in Delhi last week.

The Centre has also been organizing various workshops to showcase the latest technologies which are suitable for the implementation of E-governance in the country including National Seminar on ODF, Workshop on Datacentres and Workshop for IGNOU.

Speaking about the new Center, Mr. Jaijit Bhattacharya, Director- Government Strategy, Sun Microsystems India said, “The role of technology in enabling E-governance is paramount. Technology can connect the three participants in an E-governance structure, namely government, citizens and businesses, as well as support processes and activities. Sun’s worldwide Centers of Excellence program promotes collaboration in the industry and helps build new technologies and communities. The Centre for E-governance is yet another demonstration of this. Sun and IIT share a common vision for the advancement of technology use in the government and bringing faster, more precise results to both the public and private community through leading technology.”

We have already received very positive feedback from several government agencies such as Ministry of IT and National Informatics Centre with some of them expressing a keen interest in sourcing out the strategic conceptualization of projects from this Center for E-governance. This shows we are headed in the right direction, and with time we will be able to fulfill several of the objectives we set for ourselves at the beginning of this project and thus contribute to the overall progress of this country, “ he further added.

According to Professor M.P.Gupta from IIT Delhi, “There is a lot of research in the area of technology required to implement E-governance effectively and also in the socio-economic area to analyze the requirements of different government organizations and the citizens. This calls for a collaborative effort between the government, academia and a technology provider. Our collaboration with Sun Microsystems leverages their industry leading technology in order to create a sound technology platform for E-governance projects. This Center is also an apt platform to further the cause of open source and open standards, both of which are extremely relevant for the government and Sun’s expertise and propagation of these two areas as well known.”

Globally, Sun CoEs are focused on high-performance computing, bioinformatics, geosciences, computational fluid dynamics, e-learning, digital libraries, business incubation, and administrative computing.

About Sun Microsystems
Sun Microsystems develops the technologies that power the global marketplace. Guided by singular vision –”The Network is the Computer(TM)” — Sun drives network participation through shared innovation, community development and open source leadership. Sun can be found in more than 100 countries and on the Web at http://sun.com

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