Sun Microsystems and the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) have announced the establishment of an e-governance centre in Delhi.

The centre will conduct research on a variety of topics, such as the improvement of social infrastructure, security enhancement and a reduction of the government's budget. The insititute is also slated to evaluate the impact of technology on society and formulate appropriate IT policy papers.

The e-governance facility has already organised various workshops to highlight technological advances, such as the national seminar on ODF, workshop on data centres and the IGNOU workshop.

"The role of technology in enabling e-governance is paramount," said Jaijit Bhattacharya, a Sun India director. "Technology can connect the three participants in an e-governance structure, namely government, citizens and businesses, as well as support processes and activities. We have already received very positive feedback from several government agencies such as Ministry of IT and National Informatics Centre with some of them expressing a keen interest in sourcing out the strategic conceptualisation of projects from this Centre for E-governance."

Professor MP Gupta of IIT explained that collaboration with Sun leveraged their technology to create a sound platform for e-governance projects.

"This centre is also an apt platform to further the cause of open source and open standards, both of which are extremely relevant for the government and Sun's expertise and propagation of these two areas as well known," he added.

As IT Examiner previously reported, Sun recently launched a number of new products, including a new version of its XVM Virtual Box open source hypervisor.

Virtual Box allows users to access various applications via a variety of operating systems, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Solaris. Version 2.1 features improved graphic and network performance, intuitive configuration and hardware support for the latest processors.

"The amazing growth in downloads for XVM Virtual Box shows its great popularity among developers - the software is quick to install, works with any host operating system, and major updates are available every three to four months," Dan Roberts, director of product management for Sun datacentre software, told IT Examiner. "We think the new version of xVM Virtual Box will be well-received because it offers faster performance, improved ease of use and additional interoperability."

Roberts also noted that Sun had observed a spike in enterprise adoption as companies realised the benefits of open source virtual desktop software. "For $30 per user per year, enterprises can buy a support subscription that includes access to Sun's technical team. Also, we've been very happy with the XVM Virtual Box revenue stream since the Innotek acquisition in February 2008," added Roberts. X