The University of Arkansas serves as an IBM hub for universities that are teaching mainframe and open source Linux courses. The Sam M. Walton College of Business has been enhancing students' class experiences through the use of courseware and access to hardware and software provided by IBM and the Academic Initiative. The Sam M. Walton College of Business has received a long-term loan of an IBM Systems z Mainframe Server to run software from the IBM Academic Initiative such as:

DB2

Novell SUSE Linux

LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)

IBM Rational, and

CICS

Students gain hands-on experience through the use of these tools both in the classroom and in their assignments outside of the classroom. The Walton College utilizes and assists in the development of courseware materials for instruction in Analysis & Design, Enterprise Servers, and Business Intelligence using IBM resources.

Faculty can request accounts for themselves and course accounts for their students providing them access to a variety of courses such as zOS, zLinux, Databases, CICS, etc. With the IBM accounts, faculty and students can also access the real-world datasets such as SAP Business Warehouse (BW) Frozen Foods cube, which is an excellent resource for business students to experience "slicing and dicing" data for decision making. To learn more about IBM System z case studies, please click here.

To request an IBM account, please click the Account Request. For more information on the datasets, please click the Datasets tab on the left. If you are interested in the Walton College of Business and its involvement in the IBM Academic Initiative, please contact us for more information.