North, East students gifted with IT

Dividends of peace will be enjoyed by the schoolchildren of North and East in the coming weeks when 100 schools are computerized together with broadband connectivity. These young children too will be connected to the information super highway when they start learning their lessons with the use of a classmate pc instead of textbooks.

Managing Director Sales and Marketing Group Intel South Asia R. Sivakumar said that logistics are being prepared to extend Intel Teach to the North and East within the next two to three weeks. Intel Teach Program helps teachers to be more effective educators through professional development focused on how to integrate technology into their lessons, promoting problem solving, critical thinking and collaboration skills among their students. With more than 6 million teachers trained in over 50 countries, Intel Teach is the largest, most successful program of its kind. We are working with the TRC, the regulator as well as the Telcos in the North and East on using WiMax as it is the best way to connect the unconnected in the shortest possible time. The infrastructure is already in place as Sri Lanka became 3G enabled about two years ago, but the view should be long term be it the regulatory framework or the investment strategy. He said that everybody knows what needs to be done, it is just that time is right for execution.

Speaking of recession Sivakumar said that it is part and parcel of any economy but in some instances it is small while at other times it is huge. Unfortunately this time it was rather big, but cyclical as always.

Intel had some simple but powerful ideas to face the recession. The company notwithstanding the recession invested US$ 7bln in new factories. This is a large sum of money and we are fortunate that we can take this type of decisions. Our rationale for investment was to emerge stronger when the recession ends. We never slowed down investment but we tried to become more efficient by managing the factors which were under our control. Also we as a company became more innovative as we had time to think.

Sivakumar the Managing Director Sales and Marketing Group, Intel South Asia is in charge of all sales and marketing operations for Intel products and technologies for all the South Asian countries (India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Afghanistan). As Managing Director, Siva is responsible for leading Intel towards becoming a platform oriented organisation as well as driving Intel's 'World Ahead' initiative which focuses on PC penetration for the next billion citizens in emerging markets.

Prior to this, Siva was Worldwide Director, Business Development for the Mobility Group at Intel. Siva and his team were responsible for developing the industry ecosystem and creating alliances around Intel's Mobility products. The Mobility Group included Intel's laptop, cellular handset, WiFi and WiMAX businesses.