December 23, 2021

By: Sunil Agrawal, Associate VP, Global Head of Enterprise Architecture Group, LTIMindtree

LTIMindtree organized its first-ever global hackathon event named Solvathon this year. In this collaborative event, our associates from multiple units and diverse skills came together to solve business problems in a time-bound manner to translate an innovative solution on paper into a working demo using new-age technologies.

Ideally, such events produce great outcomes when our teams brainstorm in a room and quickly codify their ideas. However, the pandemic challenged us to organize this event remotely. But to my surprise, we made it one of the most successful coding and solutioning events at an organizational level, all thanks to our grit.

Solvathon was aimed at driving market ideas and building a culture of product innovation. It inspired employees to generate a plethora of new ideas and validate product concepts quickly. Moreover, it helped to build a culture of innovation and imagination and brought the right talent under the limelight to engage in future innovations.

Officially launched on July 14, 2021, Solvathon started with our COO, Nachiket Deshpande, calling for employee registration to solve the problem statements collected from the SMEs across the organization. The teams were formed that had to identify which problem statement they were going to pick and give their best shot for. They needed to start by describing details of user journeys, solution concepts, architecture, and technology stack.

Post submission, the deliverables were evaluated, and two teams were shortlisted who would participate in a 48-hour-long coding hackathon. Despite the aggressive and short-lived nature of this round, participants focused on a particular problem statement with a diverse set of inputs and came up with outstanding results.

Quick snapshot of the event timeline

Statistics of the event

Top 10 Teams and Winners

Winners

• 1^st Prize – Team Fin-sense
• 2^nd Prize – Team Terabytes and Team Botstars – Oracle Tech Group
• 3^rd Prize – Team Lorem Ipsum

Best Innovator Prize – Team Pixel
Our SMEs and the Enterprise Architect Community helped and guided the teams to focus on expected outcomes of the problem statement and provided them with required sample data.

All participants reaching round-2 received a certificate, while winners received the prize money, along with a certificate.

As part of the event, we also scanned the code leveraging CAST Highlight for the software quality and cloud-readiness. We were amazed by the quality of code written by our Solvathon Teams as shown below in all parameters
below:

While there were many positive responses both from participants and judges, here are few selected ones:

Participants
“Having attended multiple hackathons, we could count this as one of our most memorable -right from the initial documentation, Comprehensive QnA sessions, VM provisioning, and almost 24*7 support (I received a reply even at 2.30 am).”

“It was a good experience for us to interact, share ideas and understand fresh approaches towards the problem statement.”

Judges
“Looking at the top 10 solutions, the new generation of developers can be called: AI-Native.”
“Some of the best 5 mins elevator pitches with great quality.”

To Summarize
Continuous collaboration, AI-led digital transformation and speed of innovation are pushing Solvathon like events to be a regular phenomenon. We will be back with Solvathon next year.
Until then, let’s keep solving.