Sun Microsystems, Oracle to set up developer lab in Bangalore

Bangalore: Sun Microsystems and Oracle will be setting up a developer laboratory in Bangalore that will provide independent software vendors (ISVs) in India. This will comprise a full range of Sun hardware platforms running frontline software of both companies.

The proposed 'iForce Developer Lab,' will be the second such facility in Asia, after Beijing in China. Sun Microsystems India managing director Bhaskar Pramanik says the Rs 2-crore lab will comprise Sun servers and over 150 SunBlade workstations porting all Sun software, including Solaris, Java development kit (JDK) and SunONE; as well as a full Oracle slate, including the 9i database family.

This will enable hundreds of Indian software developers and vendors serving the small and medium enterprise market to test and certify their products to rigorous international standards.

Vivek Marla, Oracle's senior director for corporate sales in India, says this will cement a long-standing partnership between the two US-based IT giants in India.

The iForce facility will also facilitate applications that run under flavours of Linux. One of the early beneficiaries of the new lab will be Jataayu, the Indian developer of a range of wireless messaging products for the world market.

Raj Kesrimal, Jataayu's marketing director, says his company is the first in the world to launch a gateway product exploiting the wireless application protocol (WAP 2.0). “This was ported using Sun's Solaris flavour of Unix.“