In this exciting time of development, in the Digital economy, there is no scope for complacency. We need to fully deploy our resources and skills to meet the challenges ahead as we gear ourselves to address the new millennium.

In the last issue of C-DAC Connect, I shared with you what I see as the role of a development institution in the knowledge-based world we live in today. We continue to view C-DAC in that perspective - of developing new technologies and reaching them to the beneficiaries through a market access mechanism. The challenge therefore is in both, viz. the development and marketing.

The vision for the new millennium we have placed before us is our guiding path. Rowing on this path, we continued to bring out new development products and maintained the lead. At this year’s Annual Foundation Day, we announced a summary list of the products we released during the preceeding year. These were:

The first quarter of the fiscal year, saw efforts directed towards the following main themes:

A close review of our development activities in the areas of Digital Library, Telemedicine, Network Security,      Multilingual Tools, Real-time Systems, e-Governance, and of course our major Third Mission on Next              Generation High Performance Computing and Communication technology and applications.

Consolidating on our significant business gains in the previous year and preparing a strategy for
maintaining a similar growth of 60% over the previous years.

Devising newer mechanisms to reach quality information technology education to the masses.

This issue carries a lead article on our work on the Digital Library. Encouraged by our success in the areas of high-end scaleable servers, multilingual-multimedia technologies, data base management/data warehousing and search engine, we took up a major project of building a Digital Library for Indian Heritage. The project is addressing both the content and the technology issues that provides a cost-effective solution suitable to our needs. The work so far carried out has amply demonstrated that such an activity has a great potential to address our needs of large Digital Libraries not only for Indian Heritage but also for large libraries in academia and our other national institutions.

Geomatics has emerged as an important discipline, combining Geographic Information System (GIS) with information technology, to address requirements of planning and monitoring of various spatial activities of the state level. With the proliferation of internet, web-based GIS offers special advantages to the adoption of Geomaties in a host of e-Governance activities. You can read more about it in this issue.

This quarter witnessed hectic activities on the supply of PARAM 10000 High Performance Computing system to BITS Pilani and BIT Ranchi and a system that was sent to the Institute for Computer Aided Design, Moscow. Another significant installation of PARAM 10000 was for an Information warehouse in the Andhra Pradesh Government Secretariat at Hyderabad. Our PARAM 10000 development and business development teams deserve a special commendation for this work completed well on time.

We continue to maintain our technological and market lead in our multilingual products. Having recently brought out the LEAP Office 2000, we were the proud recipient of the best Hindi Computer package award by the Department of Information Technology this year. Our commitment to bring the fruits of Information Technology to the masses is strengthened by our bringing in a stream of products regularly in this area. iPLUGin is the latest addition to this family – a web tool for developing diverse Internet based applications in Indian languages.
We saw a tremendous response (crossing the 12000 mark) from our students who were registering for the All India Combined Entrance Test (CET) for our coveted Diploma in Advanced Computing (DAC) course beginning in August this year. That gives us strength to maintain and further build on quality of such training courses offered by us.

In the economy where human resource is the biggest capital, every organisation has to lay emphasis and devise mechanisms to attract and retain a skilled work force. An effective appraisal system for rewarding the performing ones and preventing development of mediocrity while maintaining transparency in the process is most important. We have, therefore, through a consensus with our members, evolved an improved appraisal system.

In this exciting time of development and competitiveness in the digital economy, there is no scope for complacency. We need to fully deploy our resources and skills to meet the challenges ahead as we gear ourselves to address the new millennium.

Our strengths are our products, our technologies and services, and above all our members.

R.K. Arora