Bangalore: Dell India organized a 3-day Hackathon event at its Bangalore and Hyderabad campuses, last week. The event was conducted with the goal of generating the most innovative, intra-prenuerial ideas to be incubated and incorporated in Dell’s solutions. The annual Hackathon, which saw the overwhelming participation of over 2000 employees also served as a collaborative platform to learn and network.
Dell India Bangalore Office
With the theme of ‘creating next-gen experience for internal stakeholders and external customers, leveraging latest technologies such as cloud, social, analytics/ BI, gaming, etc.’ this year, employees comprising software engineers, technical product managers, product owners, business intelligence data scientists, and analysts participated in the event, to compete for the grand prize. This year’s contest resulted in novel ideas on Next-gen technologies and customer experience, such as — a mobile app to bring down call center costs; the ability to purchase Dell products from Twitter, without having to reach the Dell website; a security solution which detects motion through IOT and provides predictive analysis; Artificial Intelligence: A social sentiment analysis tool, based on tweets generated. The winners who came up with an innovative visual tool that allows rapid testing and validation of web-based user interfaces and user experience testing across multiple platforms ​​​​were awarded with Dell Venue Pro 8 5000 tablets.
A crucial outcome of the Hackathon is that the best, most innovative ideas are engineered and productized into valuable solutions, with an aim to enhance the overall Dell sales/customer experience. Additionally, this year’s event comprised workshops on Ethical Hacking and Security and ‘Tech Talks’ by subject matter experts on topics such as ‘Future of IT’, ‘Patent Showcase’, ‘Performance Engineering Aspects’, etc.
At last year’s event, 100+ ideas implemented within Dell were exhibited as part of an ‘Innovation Showcase’ and a majority of them were adopted within the business. This included ideas ranging from code quality improvements, business and IT process improvements, BI analytics and visualizations that provide business process insights, using Predictive analytics for improving IT processes, etc.
“Dell believes that a culture of innovation can be created and encouraged through rigorous idea generation, testing, piloting and scaling, challenging the status quo in a constructive manner and empowering team members with the appropriate tools. As the world’s largest start-up with a legacy of fostering innovation, we are very excited to have created an innovation platform that reinforces our long-standing commitment to bring out new and improved solutions that directly address customer needsâ€, said Hemal Shah, CIO, Dell India.