Pictured above: (l-r) Jon Kent and Ananth Seshan - 5G
Technologies Europe, David Maguire, Mark Paul, Mel Lees, and Opkar
Bhatti - Birmingham City University
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 their 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 their 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 BCU 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 catalyze 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 Masters programme in reputed universities
such as the Birmingham City University."