Wipro, Capgemini & others join IBM's coding initiative for natural disasters

Tech giant IBM Corp on Wednesday announced that more industry partners have joined Call for Code, its flagship programme urging developers to build products and solutions for preventing, responding to and recovering from natural disasters.

The new partners include technology firms Persistent Systems, Wipro Ltd, Capgemini and IT industry lobby NASSCOM. 

Launched in May, the initiative has so far roped in more than 35 organisations. The technology partners will host hackathons within their organisations to inspire their workforce to grow into problem-solvers, the companies said in a media statement.

The IT giant had launched the programme in partnership with David Clark Cause, United Nations Human Rights Council and The American Red Cross and has a corpus of $30 million to invest in the ideas that emerge from the programme. 

Under this programme, IBM provides access to cloud infrastructure and tools for data analytics, artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain technologies, along with training and code to the developers.

“The year 2017 was the costliest year ever for natural disasters in the Indian subcontinent,” said Seema Kumar, country leader, developer ecosystem and startups at IBM. “At the same time, India has the second-largest developer community with 3.5 million developers and we intend to harness this potential by giving developers access to tools, technologies, free code, and training with experts that will strengthen our efforts towards mitigating disasters.”

The global initiative has so far produced more than 300 events in 50 cities around the world, in addition to "Call for Code" days across 13 IBM Development Labs in eight different countries to engage developers. 

India has also held 40 similar events across all major cities in the country including Hyderabad, Bangalore, Goa, Mumbai, Nagpur, Gurugram and Chennai, the IBM statement said. 

The winning team will receive the first-ever Call for Code Global Prize, a reward of $200,000. They will also have access to longer-term support through IBM’s partnership with the Linux Foundation, as well as the opportunity to present their solution to venture capital firm New Enterprises Associates (NEA) for evaluation and feedback apart from assistance for deployment in the real world.