New Delhi: IBM India Research Laboratory (IRL) has announced the launch of its Technology Centre at its facility within the IIT campus in New Delhi.

The centre was inaugurated by Nobel laureate Dr John F Nash Jr in the presence of Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and eminent Game Theorists like Lloyd Shapley, Robert Aumann and Robert Weber.

IRL Technology Centre will offer organisations an opportunity to understand how to optimise the advantages of information technology to achieve greater returns from their business through simulations and demonstration of cutting-edge technologies.

Some of the solutions being currently showcased at the centre range are next-generation of applications for bioinformatics and Grid computing, knowledge management, and application of e-commerce to local initiatives such as speech recognition and text translation in Hindi.

Says IBM India managing director Abraham Thomas: “The IRL Technology Centre provides our customers and organisations in India and the region, with an unique opportunity to better understand the viability of a wide range of cutting-edge technologies to their businesses. IBM is the world’s largest IT company, and what truly sets IBM apart from the rest of the industry is the value-add that our research organisation brings to our customers.”

Adds IBM India Research Lab director Dr Manoj Kumar: “Customers today need to understand how best IT can be leveraged to meet their business needs and enable them to design, build and run those solutions in a way that delivers bottomline business value.

“It is imperative for us to support our customers and also complements the strategy of our new business unit, IBM Business Consulting Services, which is focussed on providing customers business process and industry expertise backed by deep understanding of technology solutions. IRL will continue creating unique platforms like the IRL Technology Centre, which will enable us to bring the best in cutting-edge technology to India.”

IBM India Research Lab is one of the eight labs IBM Research has set up globally. IBM Research is the world’s largest IT research organisation, with more than 3,000 scientists and engineers in six countries. (Three of the remaining seven are located in the US, in Almaden, Austin, Yorktown Heights, and the other four are located in Zurich, Beijing, Haifa and Tokyo). IBM is the first patent holder in history to be granted more than 3,000 US patents in a single year.

IRL focuses on areas critical to expanding India’s technology infrastructure and has significant research initiatives in the electronic commerce, e-governance, computational biology, middleware for new software business models, and technologies for human computer interaction. IRL is also working on cutting-edge technology areas critical to IBM Corporation like Grid Computing, Autonomic Computing and Blue Gene.