17th April 2001
	By Sunil Dutt Jha, CEO, iCMG, Bangalore

Year after year, software companies spend billions of dollars on the upgradation of employee skill-sets and project-based training. This year, software development companies are facing the US economic slowdown, by cutting overheads. Many believe that by 2003, corporate training spends, in the US, will increase to $62.5 billion with $15 billion being outsourced.

ICMG is a company working towards Component-based middleware, adopting CORBA Component Model (CCM) in Application and Web server technology. Says Sunil Dutt Jha, President and Chief Executive Officer, iCMG, “The task for software companies, is to produce better products, at lower costs and reduce the overheads. For this, we decided to give the industry a much-needed cost-effective training solution that saves 50-75 percent of regular training costs. We introduced ‘Component Education Server’ (CES).

CES is a distributed framework for carrying rich and interactive data through DVD, cable TV, intranet, extranet, and Internet media, which offer better quality of service (QoS). Whenever a project needs advanced IT knowledge, IT staff can learn from some of the world’s top experts. Their learning experience is seamlessly interleaved between productive on-the-job tasks, with learning during lunchtime, break-time, or after-hours. Through file Private Networks (VPN’s), IT staff can acquire new skills overnight, while on-travel at a consulting site (even overseas). The proposed technical solution has synchronized audio, video, text transcript, and converted viewgraph content. Mentoring is also provided for semi-real-time Q&A Email support (by iCMG professionals) including other kinds of content, such as quizzes, tests, assignments, examples, and software-for laboratory exercises).

While manual instruction is a one-shot delivery it takes substantial time, energy, and logistical support to arrange for the training, negotiate the time, reserve the training resources, lobby their managers, recruit their students, and cover their travel expenses. CES changes all those assumptions, as training is available on-demand, from the world’s foremost experts, at a self-paced advanced level. The Learning is interactive, with rich hands-on multimedia experiences, rather than simple reading experiences and provides flexibility and enormous cost and time savings.

Sunil says, “The course will offer Corporates a perfect cost reduction solution. A typical CORBA course costs $1,000 per day, is available on CES for a license of $1,000 per month. The CES charges are based on usage duration and the number of users. A CORBA course costs $1,500 a include fileuser licenses or $3,000 for 3 months.”

Siemens Public Communications Network, (SCN) has implemented XML-based interfaces offered under CES courses. Says Rupa Santosh, Project Manager, SCN, “We were looking for an organisation that could not only provide us with in-depth content on XML, but also with project support. The iCMG website was one of the few places where there was a lot of focus placed on XML. The CES Just-In-Time, XML training module, gave us an edge as we are always hard pressed for time in a project scenario, and developers are always struggling to attend training programs. We are able to learn ‘On-the-Job’, without interrupting our project schedules. CES offers comprehensive material and good support and unlike classroom training, people do the course at their leisure. However, this also has a disadvantage, as people need to multiplex between the training and their project work, the training material does not get the deserved focus.”