College Cultivates Tech Gifts

The Walton College received three major technology gifts in 2000:r

• SAP, the market leader in “enterprise resource planning” software donated its R/3 software, valued at $2.2 million, to Walton College’s Information Systems Department. (Tyson Foods uses SAP software as well.) Tyson pays about $100,000 per year to support the SAP software with hardware, maintenance, training and personnel. The UA has three more years on that contract before the software and hardware may need to be updated.r

• IBM, the world’s largest information technology company, donated an S/390 Enterprise Server and full suite of e-business software to the Walton College. The $1 million mainframe computer is about the size of three refrigerators stacked side to side. In addition, IBM has been donating $1 million worth of software per year since that contract began.r

Wal-Mart, Acxiom, American Freightways Inc., Arkansas Best Corp. and Dillard’s Inc. provide support for the continuing operation of the curriculum based around the S/390. The UA has two more years of funding to operate the S/390, which costs about $100,000 per year to operate. That cost is shared with the College of Engineering and Graduate School, which also use the mainframe and software. A new version of the IBM S/390, called ZOS, is already on the market. “We’re looking at when we’ll be adopting that new machine,” Hardgrave said.r

• A grant from NCR and Wal-Mart provided a 1,500-SF computer system that gives students hands-on experience with data warehousing technology. The grant, valued at more than $7 million, included an NCR WorldMark computer system with 20 gigabytes of memory, 1.7 terabytes of storage and 80 parallel processors capable of 100 MIPS each. The grant also paid for software to operate the system and maintenance. The UA also has two more years of funding for that project, which costs about $100,000 per year to operate. In this case, too, the cost is shared with the College of Engineering and the Graduate School.r

Eventually, the ITRC will support the operation of the IBM and NCR computer systems.r

This past September, New York-based MineTech donated its genetic programming-based modeling software tool for data analysis to the Walton College. MineTech’s GMAX tool with 50 licenses is valued at $1.25 million. The MineTech software will be used this fall in the master of information systems course on decision support systems and in the ITRC’s Enterprise Systems business intelligence program for research.