Inter-University Enterprise Mobility Development Competition gains momentum for grand finale

The Motorola Solutions/SLASSCOM-sponsored Inter University Enterprise Mobility Development Competition is gaining momentum among the State and private sector Sri Lankan universities at  an extremely faster phase declared Motorola Solutions Director, Sri Lanka Country Manager  and SLASSCOM Board Member Anuradha Tennakoon at the  boot camp held at Open University, Nawala  recently.

This event running for the third consecutive year is going through an exponential growth from the beginning. A total of 91 proposals have been received this year against last year’s 47 and first year’s 36; the increase is a near 100%. This shows that the university undergraduates are taking the competition very serious because of their desire for innovation and the thirst to learn new technologies.

Due to the increased number of initial entries, the review committee needed an extra one week to study all proposals and ended up selecting 17 proposals from 12 Universities including Universities of Peradeniya, Kelaniya, Jayawardenapura, Ruhuna, Jaffna, Uwa-Wellassa, OUSL, SLIIT, APIIT, IIT and SAITM for the finals to be held towards latter part of this year.

“The purpose of the boot camp is to impart the knowledge to the members of the selected 17 teams and to educate them on the tools available for enterprise mobility application/solutions development. We do not end our support only by providing tools but we also assign a senior engineer from Motorola to help and guide them until their prototype is completed. In addition to telephone support we also provide them a hot line e-mail to address their issues with a guaranteed response within 24 hours.

“During the development phase the students can have face to face meetings with Motorola’s senior engineers as and when required. This way Motorola is incurring a huge manpower cost but we consider it as our contribution to the country. Most importantly the ownership of the end product and any IP’s generated out of this exercise remain with the students and Motorola does not claim any ownership,” said Tennakoon.

Dialog Axiata, Sri Lanka’s largest mobile network service provider has come forward this year to join hands with Motorola to provide the broadband connectivity for the final event and also to help students in any network connectivity issues for their applications.  

Participating as the Chief Guest for the boot camp, Open University Professor Vice Chancellor Upali Vidanapathirana said: “This project enables the industry to join hands with the Universities system to enrich the talents and skills of young undergraduates in IT and Engineering Degree Courses to enhance their entrepreneurial capabilities. This objective is really laudable. We all know that Motorola is one of the most reputed providers of cutting edge technological solutions in the sphere of IT and Communication Technology among others. We also know that SLASSCOM which is an umbrella organisation in Sri Lanka where about 130 most outstanding providers  work together for the improvement of the IT-BPO industry in this country.

“Dialog is pleased to be part of the Motorola/SLASSCOM Enterprise Mobility Development Competition. The Dialog team was impressed by the enthusiasm and calibre of students at the event and we are looking forward to working with them and helping them develop their products for the final competition. We are committed in supporting this program and the wider developer community in Sri Lanka by leveraging upon our network capabilities, providing technical guidance and offering them a platform for monetisation of the services they develop,” said Dialog Axiata Group CIO Anthony Rodrigo.