NASSCOM Innovation award announced

Kolkata, Feb 6 (UNI) NASSCOM, a premier trade body of the Indian IT industry, today announced the finalists for the NASSCOM Innovation Awards in 2006.

From a shortlist of eighteen companies, seven finalists will be felicitated and recognised for their outstanding contribution by Prime Minister Mr Manmohan Singh at the upcoming NASSCOM 2007 India Leadership Forum in Mumbai from Febraury 7.

A NASSCOM release said here today that IT innovation was slowly gathering momentum in India. As global customers and giant ICT companies outsource their core product development and R&D work to the country and as its service providers make "out-of the-box" services a key differentiator, an ecosystem of innovation is getting built in India, it said.

Congratulating the finalists, NASSCOM president Kiran Karnik said, '' Indian IT industry is seen as the forerunner in many areas and one of the key reasons. We have been able to reach this milestone is due to the emphasis the industry places on innovation.

It is in this context that one foresees India as the future innovation hub of the world. '' NASSCOM had constituted the Innovation in IT awards which had become a platform for companies to showcase their pioneering work.

In a first-of-its-kind initiative, NASSCOM was mulling a proposal to facilitate an industry-supported innovation fund with a corpus of at least Rs 100 crore to drive innovation.

Innovation at various levels had been identified as the next imperative to sustain growth and maintain the edge of the Indian IT industry in the global markets, he added.

The award winners have been chosen for the following innovations are Bharti Airtel and IBM India for the innovative business model under which Bharti outsourced all of its IT to IBM. Among others are Evaluserve.com for its business intelligence services, customised reports and value-added research to clients in different industry verticals, such as Banking, Insurance, Hi-Technology.

HP Labs India for Gesture Keypad which is a pen based input device for phonetic scripts with larger character set. Gesture keypad revolutionises the way data is inputted.

The key focus for the NASSCOM Innovation Forum has been to build innovation as the key differentiator for the Indian IT and BPO industry.

In its third year now, the NASSCOM Innovation Awards is the premier recognition for Indian IT companies, who have instilled innovation into existing competence and have created new ideas, products, processes or technologies that drive businesses to achieve higher margins and thus profits to reinvest in the business. Post the success of this initiative in 2006; the platform had been broad based this year to include more companies innovating at various fronts.

The Indian IT-BPO industries had achieved significant maturity and consolidation over the past few years and are now set for their next phase of evolution and momentum. Having explored various dimensions for achieving global leadership and building competitive advantage through rightly skilled, industry-relevant, specialised manpower, robust infrastructure and a favourable regulatory environment, the IT-BPO industry is on the hunt for a new success mantra.

Innovation has been identified as the key imperative for the growth of the Indian IT-BPO industry that will enable India to sustain its lead in the world markets. The NASSCOM-McKinsey Study 2005 makes a strong case for innovation, suggesting that the Indian IT-BPO sector can generate over US$ 10-15 billion of additional revenues by 2010, over and above its US$ 60 billion export target, provided it makes innovation its chief growth catalyst.

UNI