Oracle opens research center in Shanghai

Oracle unveiled on Tuesday a new R&D (research and development) facility in Shanghai, China, focused on ubiquitous computing and Web 2.0 technologies.

The new center is the software vendor's seventh of such facilities in the Asia-Pacific region, including Japan, and is dedicated to developing ubiquitous computing and Web 2.0 technologies.

According to Oracle, the Shanghai site has already undertaken a project that aims to build ubiquitous computing frameworks capable of managing different types of sensor edge servers and attached devices. These include sensors, motes--or wireless sensing networks--and RFID (radio frequency identification) readers. The ubiquitous computing framework will be built to gather and dispatch data to business applications via protocols such as HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) and Web services.

Describing the center as "a major milestone" in the company's investment in China, Pascal Sero, Oracle's Asia-Pacific and Japan vice president of R&D centers, said: "With three centers strategically located in the country now, China in many ways serves as the hub of our R&D network in the Asia-Pacific region, bringing real innovations to customers in China as they work to improve efficiencies, competitiveness and profitability."

Oracle's other R&D centers in Asia are located in India's Gurgaon, Seoul, Singapore, Tokyo and the Chinese cities of Beijing and Shenzhen.

Sero, responding to ZDNet Asia, said that the centers communicate remotely to collaborate on joint projects.

The R&D centers also collaborate with 20 solutions centers across the region. The solutions centers showcase the company's offerings to local customers, as well as present local requests to the centers for further development.