India picks tiny video conferencing start-up to replace Zoom
After banning Zoom earlier this year, India’s tech ministry decided to hold a competition in order to find a home-grown video conferencing solution that could be used by the country’s public sector.
The country’s IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad announced in a recent tweet that the competition has come to a close and a winner has been decided, saying:
“Happy to share that Vconsol, a product of Techgentsia Software Technologies Pvt. Ltd. from Alappuzha (Kerala) has won the grand challenge. My congratulations to the entire team of Vconsol for coming up with such a wonderful video conference solution.”
Home-grown video conferencing solution
Techgentsia Software Technologies, which developed Vconsol, will receive $133,000 for winning the competition, $53,000 over the next three years and contracts that will see its video conferencing app rolled out across the public sector for four years.
India’s competition to find a home-grown video conferencing solution began in April of this year after the country’s government banned Zoom from being used in the public sector citing security concerns.
While almost 2,000 applicants participated in the competition, Vconsol was the first to reach a longlist of 12 and then to make it to a shortlist of five before eventually winning the competition beating out HCL and even Zoho.
In addition to Techgentsia, India’s IT ministry also chose Sarv Webs, people Link Unified Communications and Intrisive Softlabs that will each receive $33,000 to continue developing their video conferencing products over the next three months.
Via The Register
