Mediaboss Marketing

Last month, global engineering firm Siemens made one of its largest donations, valued at $750 million, to the University of Maryland.

It wasnt a financial contribution. Instead, it was a license for its engineering software. Called Product Lifecycle Management, the software simulates the design and manufacturing processes for products such as cars and airplanes. PLM uses real data about the life span of certain parts to predict, for instance, how long a car might last.

In-kind software donations arent new. Microsoft, Apple and Google, among others, have been providing free software or hardware to schools, nonprofit groups and others for more than a decade. Tech companies often use such handouts not only to further a good cause, but also to gain exposure for their products and test new markets.

IT philanthropy can take other forms, as well. Siemens, whose U.S. subsidiary in the District of Columbia took in $22 billion in fiscal 2012, has a separate philanthropic arm donating about $7million annually to educational initiatives in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields.

The company distributes its PLM licenses through a program called GoPLM, which makes hundreds of such donations to academic institutions each year. But its not purely philanthropic. Its also intended to develop a cadre of engineers familiar with Siemens products, said Bill Boswell, director of partner strategy. Its a long-term investment in that pipeline of people, he said.

As products become more sophisticated, engineering students need training in technology to help them manage the design of complex products, Boswell said. Cars have hundreds of computers in them, and the cellphone has more processing power and memory than an entire Apollo moon mission, he said.

Although the software is free, universities receiving PLM grants typically pay Siemens an annual fee of a few thousand dollars for access to tech support and software maintenance.

Hardly alone

Siemens is hardly the only enterprise that has built a structure behind its donations. A new collaboration between nonprofit, academic and for-profit ventures called Journey Forward is offering free software to breast cancer survivors and oncologists, helping them to manage care after a patient is discharged from the hospital and to raise awareness of the emerging field of survivorship care.

Journey Forward developed and released the software this year. The group consists of the advocacy nonprofit groups the National Coalition for Cancer Survivorship (NCCS), the Oncology Nursing Society, UCLAs Cancer Survivorship Center, health benefits company WellPoint and biotechnology corporation Genentech.

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Tech companies help others, themselves with donations of software