Wipro holds hackathon for its smart techies

Wipro Ltd held a brain-storming two-month-long internal virtual hackathon for its techies to develop mobile and web-based applications (apps), the global software major said on Thursday.

"The hackathon, christened 'CodeStorm AppHack' was conducted to fuel innovation and ignite creativity in our techies by developing their dream app for businesses and their customers (B2B and B2C) using cutting-edge technologies," the city-based IT bellwether said in a statement here.

Over 250 global employee teams participated in the two-month-long hackathon.

"The competitors designed apps in multiple platforms and languages including iOS, Android, HTML5, Java and other Open Source technologies involving as many as 2,000 hours of collective coding supported by a team of senior mentors," the company said.

"We want to enable an environment where employees can showcase their expertise, learn and adapt to the latest skill-sets, collaborate with their peers and use creativity and innovation to solve challenging problems," K.R. Sanjiv, CTO, Wipro said.

Wipro's Distinguished Member of Technical Staff (DMTS) community and the company's leadership team evaluated the apps and shortlisted 25 Apps.

"The company is exploring the possibility of incorporating these Apps in its customer projects which are spread across 175 plus cities in six continents and for internal uses."

"The hackathon resulted in a remarkable body of work in retail, building in-store experiences, next-gen smart grid management for power utilities, IoT (Internet of Things) based home appliance automation and control and API (Application Program Interface) mashups to enable employee-friendly business processes," Wipro added.

The winning teams added reward points into their internal rewards program.

As many as 7,000 of Wipro's 1,50,00 employees participated in 'CodeStorm' initiatives thus far.