IBM also declared the KLN College of Engineering, Tamil Nadu as the winners, JSS Academy of Technical Education, Noida as the first runners up and Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai, Tamil Nadu as the second runners up for the 2008 challenge.

The Great Mind Challenge 2009 will enable participants to get a hands-on experience on IBM software products, namely Tivoli, Information Management, Lotus, Rational and WebSphere; and Eclipse which is Open Source on a Linux platform. Mentors from IBM along with the college faculty will work closely with the students enabling them throughout the programme.

TGMC 2008 had nearly 50,000 students from 1400 colleges participating from across India. There were close to 1050 project submissions out of emerged 20 winners. A total of 400 plus workshops were conducted on the software products around the country in 2008 The winning team from K.L.N. College of Engineering worked on tools such as DB2, Rational Application Developer, Websphere application server, Struts, Ajax, XML and J2EE to develop a project named City without Crime. The team developed an online comprehensive crime reporting system to engage public, NGOs, police and government agencies to be more quick, proactive and responsive to fight with crime and criminals.

The Great Mind Challenge 2009 has been planned to be more extensive than previous years. The registrations for the challenge will commence in May and the challenge will conclude by December 2009. TGMC 2009 wills see a revamped website and activities on social networking websites and college campuses. The top five project teams will get the opportunity to present their project to key executives from the IBM India Software Lab. Depending on the commercial viability of the projects; IBM will help the students find sponsors for taking these projects live.

“This year the top 20 projects will be put on the internet to be used without charge by end users and IBM Business Partners. These are also made available to the government agencies, solution providers and academia for feedback, which helps further develop the solutions designed by the participating students.” Himanshu Goyal, Country Manager- Academic Initiative, Developer Works & Globalization IBM Software India/South Asia said.