Sybase, a California based global enterprise software company, signed an agreement with TKU on September 11 in a ceremony attended by Dr. Flora Change, TKU President, and Chen Ming-chih, a TKU’s alumnus, Sybase’s CEO. Willie Jow, one of Sybase’s Vice Presidents was also present.

In this agreement, Sybase will give five systems to TKU, which are Sybase IQ Enterprise Edition, M-Business Anywhere Application Edition, Unwired Accelerator, SQL Anyway Studio for Windows, and ASA for WinCE. Their worth is equivalent to NT$ 20,000,000 at the market price, and they were solely developed by the company. These systems will be mainly used by the Department of Information Management (DIM) and the Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering (DCSIE) of TKU for their databases management as well as data navigation. Meanwhile, these systems can be integrated into the “M Taiwan” project that is currently underway at TKU aiming at wireless technology. One of the objectives of this project is to have mobile phones equipped with wireless technology so that students can use their mobiles to be linked to libraries, TKU’s intranet, teachers’ virtual classrooms and so on. They can also dial up their friends via Internet on their mobiles. And this is no longer a pie in the sky. In fact, the Information Processing Center will launch test runs training users for this technology next month.

The chair of DIM, Prof. Shaw Reuy-shiang thanks Sybase for this generous donation as these systems can save tremendous time that would usually spent on constructing their own platform. It was time-consuming and not always effective, so with the ready made software, his students and faulty could use time more for other creative purposes, such as development software for business applications.

These systems are all extremely useful. All of them except Sybase IQ deal with wireless technology. Sybase IQ is a kind of databases management system that is designed for data management and navigation. One the other hand, SQL Anywhere Studio for Windows, which is the wireless version of Sybase IQ, that is meant for mobile phones or PDA (but not PCs).

For detailed use and functions of these systems, refer to Sybase website at www.sybase.com