First-ever SAP Research and Innovation Award in India

Mumbai: SAP Research, the global research unit of SAP and SAP Labs India, jointly announced the first-ever SAP Research and Innovation Award in India for funding research projects at leading Indian universities and research institutes. This unique initiative seeks to establish collaboration between Indian academics and SAP’s research and development departments.

Karsten Schulz, Vice President, SAP Research, APJ region commented on the initiative, "The awards demonstrate SAP’s firm belief in India’s great potential and bolster the company’s commitment to its presence in the subcontinent. I am impressed by the number of high-quality research proposals that we received and confident that the five selected projects will provide valuable insights to the Indian IT ecosystem".

Kush Desai, Managing Director, SAP Labs India opined, "SAP has always believed in the research and innovation potential that exists in India, and the Indian academia is renowned for being at the forefront of pursuing research and innovation opportunities. An industry-academia partnership seeds such opportunities and both bodies stand to gain tremendously from this symbiotic relationship."

As part of the awards program, 5 successful projects that were selected in a highly competitive process will be awarded a research grant of Rs. 1,100,000 for a project duration of 12 months. The winners will also get an opportunity to collaborate on an ongoing basis with SAP Research and its partners following the end of the sponsored projects.

The list of recipients of the research grants and their winning projects includes:

* Rapidly developing software using globally distributed teams, by Prof. Pankaj Jalote, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT), Delhi
* A framework for Visual and Formal Modeling of services, by Prof. Sundar Balasubramaniam, Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani
* Effect of subcontractor relationship ‘closeness’ on MES integration requirements for shop floor visibility in distributed manufacturing, by Prof. Sanjay Kumar, Xavier Labour Relations Institute (XLRI), Jamshedpur
* Data Mining techniques in healthcare informatics for rural health management and disease prevention, by Prof. Srinivas and Prof. Kumar, People’s Education Society Institute of Technology (PESIT) Bangalore
* Extending QoS- based routing in asynchronous distributed event based systems to deal with multiple event types, by Prof. Umesh Bellur, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Bombay

The winners will also get an opportunity to collaborate on an ongoing basis with SAP Research and its partners following the end of the sponsored projects.

"SAP has established formidable alliances with some of the best academic institutions in India and will continue to sustain these long-term engagements. With SAP Research and Innovation awards, we are further encouraging co-innovation and fruition of new ideas in the Indian IT ecosystem. Congratulations to all the winners of the SAP Research and Innovation award!", Kush Desai added.

SAP Research and SAP Labs India invited entries on contemporary and relevant research topics including advanced web technologies; real-world awareness; real-time enterprise transparency; future manufacturing; next generation enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture; service ecosystems; security and trust; technologies for emerging economies; end-to-end simplicity; business-centric networks and industrialization of software development.

Prof. Sanjay Kumar, Xavier Labour Relations Institute (XLRI), Jamshedpur commented, "We are grateful to SAP Research for providing us with a platform for incubating our ideas into business projects. We are excited to work with researchers at SAP Labs India, as this will foster sharing of best practices among the industry and the academia, a quintessential element that ensures success in innovation."

The selection process involved an initial round of online submission of a project brief, while in the second round, the contenders with the most promising proposals were required to submit a full-fledged project proposal. Post this, the third selection round witnessed 8 short-listed candidates presenting their projects with stipulated 12-month duration at SAP Labs India to a committee of SAP Research experts.