New Delhi: The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) launched India’s first Centre of Excellence - Internet of Things (CoE- IoT) at the NASSCOM Startups Warehouse in Bengaluru. The center was inaugurated by Ravi Shankar Prasad, Union Minister for Law, Government of India. The CoE will focus on leveraging IT strengths and creating a new age industry with the support of IoT based ideas.

NASSCOM reveals that IoT Market has witnessed growth of 28 percent from FY2015 - FY2016.Nearly 120 firms offering IoT solutions in India; around 60 percent IoT startups emerging post 2010.Indian IoT firms received around USD 60 mn funding in last three years, in which Indian IoT market expected to be a USD 15 bn market by 2020; accounting for nearly five percent of global market.

R Chandrashekhar, President, NASSCOM, stated, “We are pleased on launching the IoT Centre of Excellence, which takes forward our efforts towards establishing India as a global tech hub. This Centre of Excellence has been created to act as a catalyst for developing the IoT SME/Startup ecosystem of the country as well as an accelerator of IoT capabilities providing the concept and scale for industrial and societal needs. The CoE will also function as an enabler of funding, accelerating, mentoring and enterprise for the key emerging IoT startups who have been selected for incubation, after a rigorous process.”

The CoE is a joint initiative between the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DEITY), Education and Research Network (ERNET) and NASSCOM. The CoE is also supported by Accenture, CISCO, Cyient, EMC, Intel, HCL Technologies, Qualcomm, Tata Consultancy Services, L&T Technology Services, Robert Bosch and VM Ware as Strategic partners.  Amazon Web Services, Digital Ocean, IBM, Microsoft have signed up as Infrastructure partner to the initiative.

Dr Ajay Kumar, IAS, Additional Secretary, Department of Electronics and Information Technology, (DeitY), said, “IoT is one of the high growth potential areas in the IT sector. With the growing number of IoT based SMEs/Startups in the Indian market, it becomes imperative to create an enabling ecosystem to help evolve this space, empowering companies to build technologies that provide global solutions.”

“Paradigm shift from IT to IOT, together with smooth shift of data & utilities using different electronic hardware structured with analytics, is going to enable a smart integrated & networked world. We are happy to partner with NASSCOM, which is bringing-in Industry to help democratize innovation, by creating Centre of Excellence (COE) for start-ups in PPP mode,”Dr Neena Pahuja, Director General, Education and Research Network, (ERNET) said.