IBM installs IT hub in university

US IT giant IBM and the Unicamp University in the Brazilian state of São Paulo have signed an agreement to create an IT hub on the Unicamp campus, an IBM press release said. IBM was not willing to give an investment figure as all equipment was donated to Unicamp, an IBM spokesperson told BNamericas. The new mainframe zSeries server will give access to worldwide partner universities and research institutes apart from Unicamp's own teaching and research institutes. The hub is also open to be used by local IT companies such as software developing firms. IBM will also provide IBM software and middleware, such as DB2, Tivoli and WebSphere while the Linux platform is Novell SuSE. The agreement is part of the IBM Scholar program, which provides IT equipment and solutions to schools, universities and researchers from teaching institutions around the world. Worldwide 3,900 universities and schools participate in the Scholar program, 195 of them in Brazil, the IBM spokesperson said. The University of Campinas, or Unicamp, is one of Brazil's main public universities, with 10% of the entire country's postgraduates and about 15% of university research. Campinas is a city of 1 million people located 100km north of São Paulo.