The Government of India has launched its first Centre of Excellence for Internet of Things (IoT) in Bangalore.
The Centre of Excellence (Cfor IoT was first announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2015 as a art of the larger initiative Digital India. The CoE has been built by the Govt. of India in partnership with Nasscom, Department of Electronics & Information Technology (DeitY) and Education and Research Network (ERNET). Several companies such as Accenture, Cisco, Intel, HCL Technologies, Qualcomm, TCS and L&T Technology Services and others are also supporting this initiative.
On the event of the launch Nasscom President R. Chandrashekhar said, “This Centre of Excellence has been created to act as a catalyst for developing the IoT 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 estimated cost of CoE is around Rs 22 crore over a period of 5 years which will be slit between the Centre, the Karnataka Government and Nasscom.
According to Nasscom, 120 firms offer Internet of Things solutions in India. Out of those 120, nearly 60% of them emerged after 2010. In the last three years, Indian IoT firms received around $60 million in funding. The Indian IoT market is expected to be $15 billion by 2020. In five years, the global opportunity is likely to touch $300 billion.
The aim behind setting up a CoE for IoT is to create applications and domain capability as well as gather talent and help in building the startup community.
