India's Tech Heroes and their award-winning projects

Given that last year was pretty grim for most companies, one would have

expected a dull and dreary year sans any innovative projects. But the truth is

exactly the opposite. The level of innovation that was achieved by organizations

in India during this passing economic crisis has been even more amazing than

last year. So all the 13 winning projects of the Best IT Implementation Awards,

and even the remaining 11 finalists have a wow factor to them.

All the 24 shortlisted projects this time have used technologies that are the

hot buzzwords today-Cloud Computing, virtualization, Green IT, BI and DSS, etc.

They've all used these technologies very innovatively  which makes them stand

out from others.

The Unified GIS project of Bharti Airtel, which is the Overall Best IT

project for this year is a fine example of innovative usage of GIS technologies.

The company has mapped the entire landbase of India, comprising of all cities,

6L villages, railroad and highway networks, mountains, hills, water bodies,

forests, etc. On top of this, they've mapped their entire network of 1L+ mobile

sites, 1.18 kms of fiber and other network inventory. This is further integrated

with their backend operations and business apps, thereby allowing much better

provisioning, site planning, and improved customer services.

Project SimpliBank (winner of maximum social impact award) tackles the

financial inclusion mandate of RBI in a very different manner. They've setup a

CBS in a Cloud based infrastructure and are providing banking to customers at

the bottom of the pyramid via the cheapest mobile phones available in the

market. It doesn't require GPRS, Edge, WAP, or any other fancy technology to

operate. Since the CBS is in the cloud, it can extended to any bank wanting to

venture into banking for the financially weaker sector of our society. Punjab

National Bank takes the financial inclusion mandate in a different stead

altogether, by deploying CBS in all the regional rural banks that come under its

wing. It has extended its own CBS solution housed in its data center to these

banks and completed the automation well before RBI's September deadline.

Power problems are a harsh reality we all live with in the country. On one

hand we're a power deficient nation, but on the other, most power problems are

also due to inefficient power networks, cables, and poor management of the same.

Reliance Infrastructure has done away with most of these problems by having a

system to monitor and manage its entire electrical network, down to the

sub-stations. Natural calamities like Tsunamis are another harsh reality we have

to live with, and the Indian National Center for Ocean Information Services is

tackling this with a Tsunami Early Warning System.

The other winning projects are equally innovative. SBI has led the way in

setting up 10000 power efficient ATMs, which were earlier power guzzlers. Aircel

consolidated its data centers into a single one and used all the green

technologies one could think of. ICICI Bank saw a problem of people not being

able to pay their loans or credit card amounts during the economic slowdown and

worked out a complex BI system that could predict who all are likely to default

and auto-generate appealing offers for them. Mahindra and Mahindra saw business

growth while others were floundering in the slowdown, and integrated the ERP

systems of 40+ companies it had acquired. NTPC used RFID to track its coal

supplies, its CISF staff on their rounds, and the truck drivers who came to

collect ashes from their thermal plants. Madhya Pradesh State Education port was

quick to react to the govt.'s Right to Eduction mandate and setup a portal to

ensure this gets done across all schools in the entire state. Infosys setup a

system to monitor the performance of its 150+ web based apps used by its

employees to ensure that they knew about the performance problems before the

employees even had a chance to complain. The Central Excise department automated

the tax filing of excise and service tax, to bring in transparency faster

servicing to the tax payers.

The above was a quick overview of the winning projects. Read on to find out

more about these projects as well as the innovative techniques used by the other

finalists.