During a recent visit by Mr Raul F. Chong, IBM DB2 on Campus Program Manager from IBM Toronto Laboratory to two separate campuses in Malaysia , two objectives were achieved with satisfactory results.
The two main objectives during the visits were to first establish and uplift the awareness for IBM DB2 Express-C amongst students in various college campuses. By means of presentations and a hands-on session for students, they were introduced to the features and capabilities of this product.
The second objective, however, is to incorporate IBM products into campus curriculum initially by establishing IBM DB2 Express-C as the database of choice.
The presentations created the awareness, and the constant message was sent out to position IBM DB2 Express-C as the community version, an IBM’s effort to encourage small and medium enterprises with a relatively fast-to-market strategy armed with a robust, scalable and most importantly, a free database yet without the encumbering factors inherited by databases offered by other players. Students were well informed, for example, that IBM DB2 Express-C, unlike others, does not come with data size limitation. Also, IBM DB2 Express-C which does not fall under GPL licensing scheme, strikes a sweet resounding chord for those who desire to bundle in their applications to be distributed freely.
The notion of IBM DB2 being a quick-to-deploy, easy-to-use and self-tuned were show cased as well during the visits. A one-day hands-on lab were given to both students and lecturers to further solidify their understandings of some features and functionalities IBM DB2 Express-C offers.
Besides the benefits and technicalities of IBM DB2 Express-C was the sharing regarding the benefits of becoming a student ambassador. At the end of the sharing, an intern student, Miss Lang Ley Cheong from University Technical Malaysia Malacca, who worked on IBM DB2 Express-C during her internship gave a strong testimony of her experience with DB2. Consequently, the peer power from the testimony did a wonder by convincing two Iranian students who were pondering upon the database to use in their final project to choose IBM DB2 Express-C over other flavours available in the market.
Tying in with this visit is the effort to promote the IBM Academic Initiative (AI) in college campuses. As a result of this visit, professors/lecturers were enthusiastic to incorporate DB2 into their curriculum. The further details of this incorporation will furnished upon next few rounds of visit
Figure 1 – A briefing with the Dean and lecturers from UniTen
Figure 2 – A one-day hands-on session with students and lecturers at UniTen
Figure 3 – Mr Raul Chong giving the speech in MMU
Figure 4 – Students paying attention during the speech at MMU
Figure 5 – Another view of attentive audience
