IBM holds contest for tech students

NEW DELHI: As part of its academic initiative in India, IBM along with IBM Business Partners, launched "The Great Mind Challenge" contest, in which 10,000 students at the country's 250 Engineering and MCA Colleges will develop software based on various project scenarios.






"The Great Mind Challenge" is designed to improve the software development skills of Indian students as they work to solve issues facing businesses today. The registrations will open to the all the Engineering and MCA college students through a website and direct mailers to the student community across India.





Through the contest IBM will also help students develop a hands-on experience on IBM software products (WAS/ WAS CE, DB2/DB2 c, WebSphere Portal and Forms, Tivoli Storage Manager and Rational, and Linux OS) and gain live project experience.





Mentors from IBM will work with the students. Active involvement from the college faculty is also incorporated into the programme. The program will continue through the end of this year. Prizes for the winning teams include high-end personal computers, iPods, USB MP3 players among others.





This challenge is an outgrowth of IBM's efforts to collaborate with the local government and university students, a repository of the top 20 projects and innovative solutions will be available free to government agencies, solution providers and academia. To facilitate recruitment of students skilled on IBM technologies, a web repository of all participating student profiles will also
be made available for use of partners as well as for IBM.






The IBM academic initiative is a nation wide initiative and is a unique exercise to groom talent at the grassroots and enable tomorrow's workforce.





IBM India has invested $1.5 million in academia initiatives in the last two years, imparting training in IBM and open standards-based technologies to 75,000 students at 300 institutes in India.





© CyberMedia News