University News Last updated 25 August 2010
Birmingham City University’s School of Computing, Telecommunications and Networks has signed a major deal to work with the global software development company 5G Technologies.
The aim of the collaboration is to support the government’s energy saving strategy by undertaking a wide range of research and development projects to improve efficiency and reduce energy costs.
The School will initially provide a consultancy service for 5G, which provides worldwide value-added automation intelligence solutions and products to a wide range of clients from leading-edge technology start-ups to large, global Fortune 50 enterprises in the areas of manufacturing, energy, utilities, retail and sports. In addition to the consultancy work, which will centre around the integration of real-time maintenance and energy management software into a range of global companies, it is also anticipated that a wide range of collaborative research opportunities for staff and students will develop including PhDs and Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs).
The collaboration will help increase the School’s postgraduate provision with a view to attracting more full-time, overseas students. 5G will be embedding its software technologies into the University’s courses and offering opportunities for collaborative research in a wide variety of areas such as energy management, plant maintenance, and real-time plant-to-enterprise integration.
Programme Manager and Birmingham City University lecturer Mark Paul said: “This strategic relationship with 5G opens up a number of collaborative opportunities for the University. In addition to consultancy we will also be able to embed its technologies into a number of undergraduate and postgraduate courses enabling students to get ‘hands on’ experience of industrial plant maintenance software. This will also lead to increased student placements and KTPs as well as collaborative R&D projects going forward."
Jon Kent, Commercial Manager, 5G Technologies Europe Ltd, said: “This relationship with Birmingham City University shall be a shining example of active university-industry collaboration for fast-tracking the diffusion of new ideas and products in manufacturing and business intelligence to the industry. Through our relationship we shall jointly work towards building the capabilities for the SMEs in the UK to adopt new technologies to their competitive advantage without having to incur huge capital costs”.
The Chairman and Managing Director of 5G, Dr Ananth Seshan said: “Our company has a good history of nurturing bi-lateral academic partnerships – as a strategy, we catalyse the development of new intellectual property, which is the core of our business, by investing in long-term joint research activities performed under the auspices of a PhD or master's programme in reputed universities such as Birmingham City University.”