SAN JOSE , CA : February 27, 2007 – AvantSoft, Inc. an Eclipse Foundation member since 2005, announced today the launch of Eclipse University (EU), a training portal that provides professional learning solutions from E clipse and Java Community including Eclipse member companies and individual experts

Eclipse is an open source development platform comprised of extensible frameworks, tools and runtimes for building, deploying and managing software across the lifecycle. As of July 2006, there were 700,000 Eclipse SDK production downloads per month. “With Eclipse being the leading integration platform and training being the number one barrier to Eclipse adoption, Eclipse University fills this void by making it a community effort”, says Dr. Ashvin Radiya, President and CTO of AvantSoft, Inc

Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director of Eclipse Foundation, comments on the Eclipse University . "The universal availability of high quality, professional learning solutions is critical for the continuing success of Eclipse community. It is encouraging to see the new Eclipse University initiative being established to help provide these critical resources.”

“EU removes all barriers to training - travel time, space, costs, and language - by offering classroom training, live virtual classes, boot camps, and self-paced tutorials on Eclipse products and technology”, says Dr. Radiya. In addition to classroom instructor-led training, EU offers VIRTUAL classes and boot camps (similar to conference tracks) with live instruction and hands-on labs using web meeting facilities. Learning solutions are geared for enterprise Java developers at corporations as well as individual developers all over the world

“EU will include largely fee-based instructor-led learning solutions which will assure higher quality of Eclipse education and also provide an incentive for learning solution providers to keep courses up-to-date”, adds Dr. Radiya. EU will also include self-paced tutorials and free learning resources.

Besides providing education on Eclipse technology to enterprise developers, Eclipse University can bring valuable benefits to Eclipse adopting companies and Eclipse experts. Companies can give product demos or technology seminars and tutorials at EU Bootcamps. This will bring about better understanding of Eclipse products to the consumers evaluating various products. Eclipse experts can also get involved with EU as instructor, author, or tutor during their free time and earn money on the side.

Eclipse University will begin offering bootcamps and virtual classes from AvantSoft curriculum from March 2007. Virtual classes will include full length 3 to 5 day courses on Java, Eclipse RCP, GEF, EMF, and CDT. AvantSoft has a full spectrum of Eclipse related training courses which have been provided as onsite training to several large companies from various sectors including software, manufacturing, finance, defense, medical, communications, education, and government. Additional courses and learning solutions from other companies will also be offered on Eclipse University . “A large number of companies in U.S. , Europe, and as far as Bangalore , India have benefited from Eclipse RCP training of AvantSoft”, says Dr. Vibha Dixit, VP of Business Development at AvantSoft.

Eclipse University (EU), founded by AvantSoft, is an innovative community training portal which offers professional learning solutions for and by Eclipse Community. EU offers customized onsite classroom training, live instructor-led virtual public courses, bootcamps with hands-on tutorials, and also self-paced learning material. It covers a full spectrum of Eclipse and Java related technology areas including Ecliipse Plugins, RCP, GEF, GMF, EMF, CDT/JDT, AJAX , J2EE WebServices, Struts, Hibernate, Spring, JSF, XML, and Java using WebLogic, WebSphere, JBoss. EU Industry zone includes educational materials on Eclipse products, tools, and plugins to enable Eclipse enterprise consumers to make informed decisions on technology directions for their business applications. Visit EU at http://www.eclipseuniversity.org and AvantSoft at http://www.avantsoft.com