Hyderabad: It is going to be a double IT bonanza for the city as after zeroing in on Hyderabad for a centre of excellence (CoE) on big data and analytics, Nasscom is now planning another CoE for internet of things (IoT) in Hyderabad, senior Nasscom officials said.

“We have already set up one of the IoT CoEs in Bengaluru. The Union government is looking at setting up more and Hyderabad is one of the cities. If you look at IoT, it is one of the game changing technologies that can have tremendous impact in many verticals such as retail, e-governance and healthcare, among others,” said Nasscom sector skill council chairman B V R Mohan Reddy, who was also Nasscom chairman during 2015-16.

Sanjeev Malhotra, CEO, IoT Centre of Excellence, told that Nasscom is waiting for an approval from the central government. “Once approval is granted, we will request for space from the state government. This will be set up in a public private partnership (PPP) model, wherein half of the funding will come from the central government and half from industry,” he said. He pointed out that once the project is approved, Nasscom will require around 10,000-15000 sft space for setting up the centre, of which around 3,000 sft will be lab space, he added.

Nasscom, in association with the Department of Electronics & Information Technology (DeitY) and Education and Research Network (ERNET), had last year in July launched its first IoT CoE at Bengaluru. Given the vast scope of engagement with startups in the area of IoT, Nasscom is planning to set up four more IoT COEs in the country. These centres are expected to come up in Hyderabad, Gurgaon, Ahmedabad and Andhra Pradesh (where the location has not been decided yet but is expected to be in either Visakhapatnam or Tirupati).

Malhotra explained that all these IoT centres will be focussing on the usage of IoT in separate verticals. “There will be some common layers wherein there will be labs in all the CoEs, where startus can come and work. But each CoE will have a separate focus area … there will be some specific areas around specific verticals like healthcare or agri,” he said. In Hyderabad, Nasscom is mulling setting up the IoT CoE focussed on agri tech but it has not been finalised yet, he said. The Nasscom senior official also pointed out that the goal is to promote IoT and help entrepreneurs take this technology to the end users, which in this case are manufacturers. “We are not trying to become another T-Hub…We are only going to deal with startups who have deep technology,” he said. Meanwhile on the status of the centre of excellencefor big data and analytics in Hyderabad, IT principal secretary Jayesh Ranjan said the central government is expected to sanction the requisite budget this year.

Source: Times of India