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IBM India Announces 'The Great Mind Challenge 2008'
IT News Online Staff
2008-03-25

IBM in collaboration with its business partners has announced "The Great Mind Challenge 2008", a contest under its Academic Initiative program that provides student programmers with an opportunity to develop innovative solutions using open standards-based IT tools under grueling real time situations.

The theme for the 2008 Challenge is "Search for XML Superstar". The contest will enable participants to get a hands-on experience of IBM software products, namely Tivoli, WebSphere Application Server, WebSphere Application Server Community Edition, DB2/DB2 Express-C, WebSphere Portal/Forms and Rational, as well as Eclipse, which is Open Source on a Linux platform.

Pradeep Nair, Director - Software Group, IBM India/SA, said, "The IBM Great Mind Challenge is aimed at encouraging students who aspire to make vital contributions by developing applications on leading-edge IBM technologies. We enable them to work on real world project scenarios with the objective of providing them scope for substantially improving their software writing skills."

IBM also declared the winners of the 2007 Challenge. K .L. N. College of Engineering and the runners up from Gujarat Vidyapeeth, Gujarat and Amrita School of Engineering (Deemed University), Tamil Nadu were felicitated at an awards ceremony in Mumbai today.

The winning team worked on tools such as DB2, Websphere Application Developer, Websphere Application Server, Rational, etc. to develop 'District Collectorate Office Information Integration' that will help to maintain information about citizens and provide some basic level services to citizens. Citizens can request for Birth, Community, Income certificates and Ration card online. It will help to expedite retrieval and processing of information.

Mentors from IBM along with the college faculty worked closely with the students enabling them throughout the program. A total of 365 plus workshops were conducted on these software products around the country in 2007.

The Great Mind Challenge 2007 covered 28 States and 7 Union Territories and the students registrations went up form 21800 to 62456.

"The top 100 participants of TGMC got a special opportunity to be screened by IBM HR for placement within IBM. The Academic Initiative program also maintains a student job portal facilitating the students to upload their resumes and apply for relevant IT positions," added Nair.

The IBM Academic Initiative offers workshops and certification programs on various technologies like Service Oriented Architecture, XML, Infrastructure Management, DB2, WebSphere, IBM Community Edition Software, etc. The company said it has successfully imparted training on open standards-based technologies to more than 125,000 students across 575 colleges in India during 2007 through the various AI programs.