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IBM announces The Great Mind Challenge 2009

Under the company's Academic Initiative programs that provide student programmers with a unique opportunity to develop innovative solutions, using open standards-based IT tools under grueling real time situations, IBM has announced The Great Mind Challenge 2009 - a contest.

IBM also declared the K L N College of Engineering, Tamil Nadu as the winner, JSS Academy of Technical Education, Noida as the first runners up and Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai, Tamil Nadu as the second runners up for the 2008 challenge.

The Great Mind Challenge 2009 will enable participants to get a hands-on experience on IBM software products, namely Tivoli, Information Management, Lotus, Rational, and WebSphere and Eclipse, which runs on Linux platform. Mentors from IBM along with the college faculty will work closely with the students enabling them throughout the program.

At the felicitation ceremony, Himanshu Goyal, Country Manager- Academic Initiative, Developer Works & Globalization IBM Software India/South Asia said "There is no doubt that the industry requires more adaptive innovators - people who have deep proficiency in a specific area, say engineering but at the same time comfortable in soft skills as well. This is primarily because the work environment is increasingly becoming collaborative. The IBM Great Mind Challenge is a platform for students to enhance and showcase their software writing skills besides acquiring skills on being an adaptive innovator. TGMC provides students with the opportunity to work on next-gen technologies, thus preparing them for a smarter planet."

TGMC 2008 had nearly 50,000 students from 1400 colleges participating from across India. There were close to 1050 project submissions out of emerged 20 winners. A total of 400 plus workshops were conducted on the software products around the country in 2008 The winning team from K L N College of Engineering worked on tools such as DB2, Rational Application Developer, Websphere application server, Struts, Ajax, XML and J2EE to develop a project named City without Crime. The team developed an online comprehensive crime reporting system to engage public, NGOs, police and government agencies to be more quick, proactive and responsive to fight with crime and criminals.

The Great Mind Challenge 2009 has been planned to be more extensive than previous years. The registrations for the challenge will commence in May and the challenge will conclude by December 2009. TGMC 2009 wills see a revamped Web site and activities on social networking Web sites and college campuses. The top five project teams will get the opportunity to present their project to key executives from the IBM India Software Lab. Depending on the commercial viability of the projects; IBM will help the students find sponsors for taking these projects live.

"This year the top 20 projects will be put on the Internet to be used without charge by end users and IBM Business Partners. These are also made available to the government agencies, solution providers and academia for feedback, which helps further develop the solutions designed by the participating students." Goyal added.

Apart from this, the IBM Academic Initiative also offers workshops and certification programs on various technologies like Service Oriented Architecture, XML, Infrastructure Management, DB2, WebSphere, and IBM Community Edition Software.