NANJING, China – Six PC makers, including Haier and Founder, announced yesterday that they have won contracts to provide a total of 141,624 PCs to the Jiangsu Provincial Department of Education for an educational program called, "School-to-School Project." At the same time, Sun Wah Linux's Debian-based [1] Chinese Operating System RAYS LX was also chosen as the operating system used in all 141,624 PCs.
"This project marks the cooperative effort of Sun Wah Linux and the Jiangsu government's use of Linux to fight against Microsoft's monopoly in China," said Alex Banh, CEO, Sun Wah Linux. "This is the largest Linux desktop roll-out in Asia, thus proving that national Linux OS is moving toward more practical usage by saving millions of dollars and bringing profound influence to China Linux development and application promotion."
The Jiangsu Province's "School-to-School Project" is the largest procurement project in the China education history. The project will supply PCs from this procurement to elementary and secondary schools in poor areas of nine cities in the provinces. A total of fifteen companies competed for PC procurement deals worth a total of RMB $346.2 million (USD $42.7 million). Dell, Hewlett Packard and Lenovo were among three of the world's largest PC makers who competed for the contract.
"This is the first time a procurement project for education is at such a large scale and we believe this application will set a good example for other "School-to-School projects around the country," said Ju Zongqi, project leader of Jiangsu Province Education Department's "School-to-School" Project. "We chose the Sun Wah Linux operating system because it reflects the urgent demand for domestic software in the education domain and proves the fact that domestically produced software has already reached a considerable level of usability. Furthermore, this project is significant both for boosting the cost-effectiveness of educational funding and the national software industry development."
More about Jiangsu's School-to-School Project
Through the School-to-school project education campaign, approximately 90% of schools in China will be connected via the Internet by 2010, subsidized by the Ministry of Education. In a nutshell, this initiative is prompting schools to become computerized by adopting price competitive advanced technologies and quality products. The campaign is proof of the Chinese government's commitment in lifting the standard and quality of its education through the use of information technology.
With more than 140,000 PCs, the 2005 Jiangsu School-to-School Project is the largest-ever purchase project in China Education Industry, which is also the biggest government purchase project this year. In addition, the deployment of Sun Wah Linux's RAYS LX marks the largest-ever Linux deployment in China.
Sun Wah Linux [2] is supplying the program and products to the Jiangsu Provincial Department of Education, in addition to Linux training, technical support and maintenance. After completion of the project, Sun Wah Linux will seek further cooperation with the Jiangsu Education Department, making common efforts in training qualified OSS teachers, building education system, and trying to build complete education solutions based on open source software in cooperation with other software & hardware vendors.