Three Information Technology Industry Leaders Claim Sponsoring Roles in New Research Lab

This past December 2005, Google, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems announced that they are contributing $500,000 a piece for five years to back research at a new University of California at Berkeley research lab. Along with smaller contributions by a few other IT companies, these monies will account for 80% of the funding.

RAD Lab (Reliable, Adaptive, and Distributed Systems Laboratory) has been created to help entrepreneurs who are focused on developing broad based online services (with functions similar to online successes Amazon and eBay). The goal is to make these inventor's creations as widely available as possible. There are high hopes for remarkable Internet ideas and budding company launchings to come out of this laboratory, similar to the births of other web-based phenomenons like Google and eBay.

The money from the academic research sponsors goes to innovative research on software engineering, web based software, and creating technologies that can help entrepreneurs make their growing services available to a large population with greater efficiency. The potential software that will emerge from the lab will be available at no charge for those who are interested under the Berkeley Software Distribution license.

The lab will be staffed by six university faculty and roughly 12 computer science graduates with the intention of growing that to 30 graduate students over time. All three leading contributors will serve as advisors and will take no part in working at the lab.

Government spending on this type of research has decreased significantly and therefore it's important for innovative industry leaders like Google, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems to sponsor such research that will ultimately lead to future generation networking technology.

For more information visit http://radlab.cs.berkeley.edu/wiki/RAD_Lab