Donations given to Computer Science

The Computer Science Department has received $750,000 worth of software and site licenses from the Oracle Corporation. The donation follows in the wake of $3.6 million in software and site licenses awarded to the department by the company last year.

This year’s donation includes 150 licenses of Oracle’s complete software product line for Windows 2000, valued at $5,000 per user. “These licenses will be distributed to students enrolled in the database courses that our department will offer this year,” said Leo Irakliotis, Associate Chairman of Computer Science.

Last year, Oracle donated 500 site licenses and nearly a full range of its software products.

“We have the opportunity to expose our students to the real tools that they’re going to work with once they graduate,” Irakliotis said. “A lot of employers explicitly ask for experience with Oracle when they hire people.”

Oracle is the world’s largest supplier of software for information management, and its software products are used to perform a variety of functions, ranging from enterprise resource planning and electronic commerce to dynamic Web site publishing and customer relations management.

The ability to perform enterprise resource planning is especially important to linking information technology systems in large corporations, Irakliotis said.

Each department of a corporation is likely to have its own information technology system. Enterprise resource planning software enables authorized users within the corporation to seamlessly access needed data from the systems of other departments.

About 90 Computer Science graduate students will use the new software.

The Computer Science master’s program is open to students with little or no formal training in computing. Students come from the ranks of existing professionals in other disciplines, including business, medicine and law, Irakliotis said.