Are Indian's the smartest software programmers? It sure seems so!
Two Indian teams and one Indian from New York have won the Computer Associates Ingres Million Dollar Challenge.
The winners delivered migration toolkits from Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and MySQL to CA's Ingres r3 open source platform. Between them, the three have netted $550,000 in prize money.
The challenge was designed to leverage the global talent pool of the open source community, while providing substantial financial compensation to those who successfully met its requirements.
Under its terms, open source developers were invited to create solutions that enable users of popular databases to migrate to Ingres. Qualifying solutions were eligible for cash awards up to $400,000, with a total purse of $1 million.
Shift2Ingres, an Oracle migration toolkit submitted by Harsh Azad, Rohit Gaddi, Achal Rastogi, Geetanjali Bahuguna and Ashutosh Upadhyay of New Delhi won the largest prize of $400,000.
EzyMigrate, submitted by Danes John and Varghese Jacob of Kerala, was awarded a prize of $100,000;
DbConverter, submitted by Bipin Prasad of New York, was awarded a prize of $50,000.
"We are grateful for the hard work and creativity of the open source developers who participated in our challenge, and we will continue working with the open source community to develop migration tools for Ingres," said Tony Gaughan, senior vice president of development at CA, in a statement.
"With these tools, organisations can easily and cost-effectively transition away from proprietary databases to take advantage of Ingres' highly scalable, feature-rich open source database platform."
Submissions were registered on SourceForge. The judges included Robin Bloor, partner, Hurwitz & Associates; Tony Gaughan, senior vice president of development at CA; Gavin King, founder of Hibernate, JBoss, Inc; Alan Runyan, founder and lead architect of the Plone content management system; Michael Stonebraker, founder and CTO of StreamBase Systems.
Team profile -- Shift2Ingres
Harsh Azad: Harsh is a Technical Analyst with Trilogy E-Business Software India Pvt Ltd He holds a master's degree in computer science from University of Pune. Harsh has won prizes and contests on computer programming organised by The Computer Society of India and South East Asian Regional Computer Confederation during college days.
Rohit Gaddi: Rohit is a Technical Analyst with Trilogy E-Business Software India Pvt. Ltd. He holds master's degree in computer application from Pune University. Rohit was ranked 37th in a recently held Google India Code Jam 2005. He was also a Junior Research Fellow with Computer Science Department, Pune University from July- Nov 2002. Rohit was ranked amongst the top 1 percentile in NCST entrance 2001.
Achal Rastogi: Achal is working with Trilogy E-business Software (I) Pvt Ltd for past one year. He holds master's degree in computer application from National Institute of Technology, Trichy. Achal's areas of interest include Databases, Data Structures and Operating Systems. Besides winning the Ingres Million Dollar Challenge, Achal secured 2nd rank (all India) in DOEACC 'O' level exam recognised by the Union ministry of human resources and development.
Geetanjali Bahuguna: Geetanjali is a Technical Analyst with Trilogy E-business Software (I) Pvt. Ltd, Bangalore. An MCA from University of Pune, Geetanjali was a topper in college for all the three years during her bachelor's in mathematics from University of Delhi.
Ashutosh Upadhyay: Ashutosh is currently working with Trilogy E-Business Software (I) Pvt. Ltd, Bangalore. Ashutosh holds a bachelor's degree in computer science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee.
Ashutosh has won several prizes and awards in various software and programming contests organised by IIT Roorkee.
Team Profile -- EzyMigrate
Danes John: Danes is currently working with Oracle India at Bangalore. He is responsible for the design and development of Oracle tools. Danes holds a master's degree in computer application from TKM College of Science and IT, Kollam, Kerala.
Varghese Jacob: Varghese is currently working with Oracle India at Bangalore. He has over two years experience in Database and ODBC Internals. Varghese holds a master's degree in computer application from Bharathiar University, Tamil Nadu, India.