Nace to open 200 centres

The company, which commenced operations in June last year, will also foray into the education markets in West Asia and other parts of Asia this year, Nace Solutions chief executive officer S Gopal told reporters. Nace will debut in Malaysia and Singapore by September this year, he said.

As part of expanding further in India, Chennai-based Nace has opened a regional office in Kolkata, and two training centres in Bangalore. It is presently signing up for seven more centres in Karnataka. "We plan to operate 18 centres in all the district headquarters of Karnataka by March next year," Gopal said.

Promoted by the Swami Abhedananda Trust, an educational group, Nace presently operates seven fully-owned training centres in South India, and 16 franchisee centres, where it offers courses in C, C++, Java, J2EE, datawarehousing and programming on the .NET platform. Sensing the lacuna in professional training on open source technologies, the company has also offered specialised courses in LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PhP) technologies.

"The primary advantages of embracing open source lie in cost factor and security. This explains the migration from proprietary technologies to open source. About 80 per cent of enterprises worldwide are expected to switch over to open source technologies by 2010," Gopal said.

Quoting a Nasscom survey which places the number of software professionals in India to reach nearly 2.3 million by 2010, Gopal said the industry would face a shortage of half a million skilled knowledge workers by that year.

"Highly skilled faculty and hands-on training will be a prerequisite to meet this demand on the qualitative and quantitative front," Gopal said.

He said all new centres being set up by the company, including franchisees, would have faculty who are direct employees of the company and certified by Sun Microsystems, Microsoft or Redhat to maintain high quality standards and uniform teaching techniques.