FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — The Sam M. Walton College of Business, University of Arkansas, announced that Dillard’s Inc. has donated $50,000 to its Enterprise Computing Curriculum program. In addition, the department store company is providing a large dataset for teaching and research.

"We are very grateful to Dillard’s and its vice president and chief information officer, Bill Holder, for this gift. They have been long-time partners in the support of our enterprise curriculum program," said David Douglas, professor of information systems and chair of the Enterprise Computing Curriculum. "The funds from Dillard’s will be used for maintenance costs for the university’s part of the mainframe used for academic purposes. This gift will play a critical part in the continued development of the mainframe portion of its Enterprise Curriculum.

In May 2005, as part of its Academic Initiative, IBM donated a z/890 server, software technologies, training materials, hardware, and technology consultants to the University of Arkansas. Although IBM provides mainframe software free of charge for academic purposes, the university must still shoulder the hardware maintenance costs.

"It is important to have computing degree programs that include the mainframe as a significant platform," added Douglas. "This is reinforced by the recent announcement by IBM detailing their efforts to rejuvenate the mainframe workforce by attempting to train 20,000 new mainframe professionals by the year 2010. People have been predicting the demise of the mainframe for more than 20 years; most computing degree programs ignore mainframe. What people forget is that the mainframe environment changes dramatically, as do all information technology environments, and the role of the mainframe now is that of a server - the server of choice for many due to its reliability, scalability and manageability. Many organizations such as Dillard’s continue to depend heavily on the mainframe for their computing needs."

The large dataset provided by Dillard’s allows students in information systems, computer science and computer engineering to have unique learning and research opportunities in a variety of academic pursuits - including database technology, data warehousing, business intelligence, data mining, and data analysis for the various business disciplines.

Paul Cronan, holder of the M.D. Matthews Chair in Information Systems and director of Enterprise Computing, said, "The goal of enterprise computing at the University of Arkansas is to help students better understand how data warehousing, e-business, and other large-scale systems work together to support management decision making. These funds and dataset gift from Dillard’s are helping transform the university into a world-class information technology center. Now students can use multiple large-scale computing platforms and realistic databases as a routine part of their studies."