Aptikom and VMWare bringing virtualisation and cloud to universities

• Despite increasing demand, no university offers cloud computing as a subject
• VMWare and Aptikom build curricula together and equip research centres

THE Indonesian Association of Higher Education in Informatics and Computer Science (Aptikom) has joined forces with virtualisation software firm VMWare Indonesia to bring the VMWare IT Academy Programme to teachers and lecturers in 99 universities across Indonesia.

“There is an increasing demand for universities to have proper virtualisation and cloud subjects in their curriculum. However, lecturers find it hard to teach these subjects due to limitations in materials and supporting resources,” Aptikom advisory board chairman Eko Indrajit (pic, above) told Digital News Asia (DNA) in Jakarta recently.

Eko, who is also a professor of computer science at the Asian Banking Finance and Informatics Institute of Perbanas, said there is no university in Indonesia that offers cloud computing as a subject.

“How can we teach our students to leverage on cloud computing, to build something on top of it, if we do not have lecturers equipped with materials and training? How do we teach our students if we do not even have labs for them to work in?” he asked.

For VMWare Indonesia, providing materials and crafting curricula for lecturers and students is an investment.

“Market penetration for virtualisation, cloud, and big data is still relatively low, therefore the potential is huge. To push the market further, we need to push for education, push for graduates to have skills in such areas,” VMWare Indonesia senior director and country manager Adi Rusli (pic, right) explained.

According to Adi, VMWare will craft the curriculum and provide materials that can be adopted or even localised by Indonesian universities, as well as offer certification for both lecturers and students with VMWare subsidising the certification costs by up to 70%.

Localisation of the curriculum is necessary, according to Aptikom’s Eko, including translation to Bahasa Indonesia and providing additional guidance on the programme, as it will help encourage more participants.

Cloud research centre
The collaboration between Aptikom and VMWare Indonesia also brings to the fore, five existing university research centres in Palembang, Jakarta, Makassar, Bali and Banjarmasin to be centres of virtualisation and cloud hands-on experience for lecturers and students.

“These five research centres are spread across each main island of the country. The objective is for them to allow access to other universities and become shared knowledge centres,” Aptikom’s Eko said.

He added that most universities in the country have no capabilities to build state-of-the-art research centres and therefore there is a need for collaboration amongst universities.

VMWare will equip these research centres with software licences in virtualisation, cloud computing, network, and storage.

“It depends on the needs of each research centre. The software license given might differ depending on further discussions with Aptikom,” VMWare’s Adi added.

Aptikom is aiming to push certification and more hands-on experiments with students via the collaboration. With the changing nature of learning, hands-on experimentation is far more desirable as it will benefit students greatly once they graduate.

“We want to nurture graduates who are skilled in tracking trends in IT and the digital world. The world is now talking about cloud computing and big data, therefore we need to prepare our students with the necessary skillset,” Eko said.

 
Related Stories:

IBM technologies to be embedded in Sunway University’s ICT courses

Temasek Polytechnic and Cloudera in data science pact

12 free courses: Learn online or on the go

Utar joins Cloudera big data academic programme

 
For more technology news and the latest updates, follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn or Like us on Facebook.