Tata's are traditional known for their nurturing approach to business and never visualized as focused persistent capitalists out to make only money.  As part of its continuous endeavor to support innovation and play a crucial role in development of enterprises, entrepreneurial ventures and growth of industries, Tata Communications announced its support of iAccelerator on the 8th of December 2001 at Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship, Indian Institute of Management (IIM), New Campus, Vastrapur, Ahmedabad.

Role of Tata Communications in iAccelerator

Tata Communications' senior executives will mentor the entrepreneurs to launch their ideas. In addition, Accelerator participants will also have access to the company's leading cloud, connectivity and collaboration tools necessary to succeed in a global business community.

Nine start-ups have been selected for this year's programme and have already been provided with working space, IT infrastructure, seed capital and mentoring from a team of industry experts in order to showcase their final prototype/product in front of angel investors at the end of January 2012.

Cloud, Connectivity and Collaboration

Cloud: Tata Communications' InstaCompute is a pay-per-use cloud computing solution that leverages the company's data centres and tier-1 IP network providing start-ups with scalable and flexible access to processing power, bandwidth and storage.

Connectivity: Tata Communications provides cost-effective and dedicated 24X7 connectivity with provisions for expandable bandwidth. The start-ups will be connected to the global network (or world) through International leased lines and next-generation

Collaboration: Tata Communications offers world class collaboration solutions across audio, video and web platforms.

For more details, please visit: www.tatacommunications.com

 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Pranay Gupta, Joint CEO,

Centre for Innovation Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) says “In today's globally connected environment it was important to support our finalists with reliable and sophisticated cloud, global connectivity and collaboration tools which is why there was no question in our mind that Tata Communications should be part of the iAccelerator programme this year. We are looking forward to seeing how the start-ups make use of their access to this world-class infrastructure to further their businesses and achieve economies of scale.”

 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 About CIIE, IIMA

Centre for Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) was setup at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA) with support from Gujarat Government and Department of Science and Technology (Government of India) to promote innovation and entrepreneurship in India. Experience and expertise at IIMA in the areas of management, innovation, technology networks along with entrepreneurship provide the necessary impetus and intellectual basis for this initiative.

CIIE comprises of faculty, alumni and students of IIMA, mentors and service providers from the industry who span a variety of functional areas, sectoral domains and geographies and are passionately committed to helping disruptive innovations and aspiring entrepreneurs succeed commercially.

CIIE enables most of what may be required by entrepreneurs through seed-funding, incubation, mentoring, training, knowledge dissemination and best practice research.

CIIE is situated in IIM Ahmedabad and carries out its incubation activities through a Section-25 company set-up to promote entrepreneurship in India. For details on CIIE's initiatives towards fostering entrepreneurship, please refer to www.ciieindia.org

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Srinivasa Addepalli, Senior Vice President,

Corporate Strategy, Tata Communications says, “Investing  in talent and our communities  is a core pillar of our business philosophy. The importance start-ups play in driving economic regeneration and innovation is unquestionable. Tata Communications is excited to work with these rising stars to help them reach their full potential.”

 -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What is iAccelerator?

iAccelerator is a flagship incubator programme at CIIE, launched in 2009, designed to equip technology entrepreneurs in Internet & Mobile domain to establish well run, technically excellent and profitable companies in India. Every year, a group of tech start-ups is selected through an application process and put through a 3-month residential accelerator programme. The finalist start-ups each receive seed capital, mentoring from a team of industry experts and opportunity to showcase their prototype/product in front of early stage investors. iAccelerator is proud to have committed partners across the country in Hyderabad, Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai. The partners play an instrumental role in sponsoring the programme, selecting start-ups to co-invest in and providing invaluable mentorship, and other in-kind infrastructure and product support to the start-ups.

Some of the start-ups (out of the 17 successful ones) incubated through the iAccelerator programme in the past include Innoz, Beevolve, Hashcube, iBloom, Audech and Redanyway among others. www.iaccelerator.org