OREANDA-NEWS. Tata Communications has become the main sponsor of the first simultaneous hackathon event linking together Silicon Valley and Bangalore (July 12-13, 2013). During the two-day hackfest, over 200 developers in both locations will work together, across borders, to innovate next-generation 'open-standard' collaboration tools. These will be built over new open APIs (application programming interface) including WebRTC.

The winning concept will be incubated by Tata Communications through November 2013. According to Gartner1, collaboration technologies jumped into the list of top five CIO priorities this year. In today's digital, always-on and globalised environment, true collaboration requires interconnectivity and interoperability in order to provide a richer experience for the end-user. By crowdsourcing the best minds across Silicon Valley and Bangalore, 'The Future of Collaboration' hackathon provides a gateway to rapidly develop, prototype and innovate applications using new web standards to address everyday collaboration challenges.

Julie Woods-Moss, chief marketing officer and CEO of Nextgen, Tata Communications, says, “The key to successful collaboration technology is to increase productivity, regardless of location or synchronicity. Tata Communications is excited to sponsor this hackathon which will catalyse new ideas, apps and tools for collaboration based on open systems. Bringing together teams from Bangalore and Silicon Valley for the first time will enable a new creative force in this important sector. This runs in sync with our strategy at Tata Communications to build interconnected and open ecosystems - be it for voice, mobility or business video.”

Internet-based technologies such as WebRTC take communications and collaboration to the next level, providing a simple, ubiquitous, and rapid deployment method - one which only web-based platforms can provide. Tata Communications has an open ecosystem approach to voice, mobility, and business video solutions. The company has the largest interconnected ecosystem for business video and mobile network operators. Underpinning its robust collaboration offerings is its undersea cable network which is the world's largest and includes the first wholly-owned fibre optic cable network ring around the world. Its network also accounts for 20 percent of the world's internet routes today.