1M/1M Announces Partnership With Persistent Systems; CrowdEngineering First Beneficiary

Menlo Park, CA, and Pune, India – January 27, 2011: One Million by One Million (1M/1M) and Persistent Systems have announced a partnership to connect entrepreneurs to customers. The 1M/1M initiative set up by Sramana Mitra has a goal to help a million entrepreneurs reach $1 million in revenue.

Headquartered in Pune, India, Persistent Systems is a leader in outsourced product development. Persistent works with more than 250 customers and will be reselling and also be a channel for products from select 1M/1M entrepreneurs. In addition, Persistent Systems will also provide outsourced product development services to these companies.

“The 1M/1M philosophy is to focus our entrepreneurs on customer acquisition and early validation without burning through a huge amount of cash,” explains Sramana Mitra, founder of 1M/1M. “Towards that end, we introduce entrepreneurs to partnership opportunities where they can go to market efficiently by leveraging other people’s channels. Our partnership with Persistent is one such big opportunity.”

“We at Persistent are very excited to work with 1M/1M in helping entrepreneurs succeed by bringing new technologies to market,” said Dr. Anand Deshpande, chairman and managing director, Persistent Systems. “We have been proactively investing in new technology areas such as cloud computing, mobility, BI/analytics and collaboration and believe that technologies developed by young companies such as CrowdEngineering when sold through right channels can have a significant impact in the market.”

CrowdEngineering
The first 1M/1M company to be leveraging this partnership is CrowdEngineering, a venture based in Pisa, Italy, and Sunnyvale, California, that develops enterprise level crowdsourcing platforms and solutions to enable crowdsourced customer support.

“1M/1M is a great program for entrepreneurs running businesses in the most difficult and vulnerable phase of their growth, the pre-1M$ revenues stage,” said Gioacchino La Vecchia, CEO of CrowdEngineering. “I look forward to the leverage that this deal with Persistent Systems will bring CrowdEngineering in terms of a cost-effective go-to-market solution, and to working with Persistent’s global sales team and technology experts. I recommend everyone with the entrepreneurship fever to join the 1M/1M program and follow its methodology.”

About One Million by One Million (1M/1M):
Founded in 2010 by Sramana Mitra, the One Million by One Million (1M/1M) initiative is an educational and business development program that aims to help a million entrepreneurs globally reach $1 million in revenue and beyond, build $1 trillion in sustainable global GDP, and create 10 million jobs.

About CrowdEngineering:
CrowdEngineering’s Business Process Crowdsourcing provides comprehensive solution to apply crowdsourcing to business processes like customer support involving employees, customer base and communities in collaborative workforces realizing the real Social CRM. Crowdsourcing can be considered an evolution of traditional outsourcing where work force is recruited among Internet users and/or companies’ own customer bases. Crowdsourcing allows enterprises to involve low priced, highly available and talented work force available on demand in internal processes. Crowdsourcing applied to customer support increase the quality of the service while enabling significant cost reduction for the companies adopting it.

About Persistent Systems:
Established in 1990, Persistent Systems (BSE & NSE: PERSISTENT) is recognized as an award-winning technology company specializing in software product development services. With more than 5,400 employees, innovative business models, and reusable assets and frameworks, Persistent helps customers increase revenues and margins, and enhance brand value. Persistent Systems has delivered over 3,000 software product releases in their last five years and has 290 customers. The company has developed proven processes for the entire product lifecycle which reduce time-to-market while delivering consistent quality and customer satisfaction – as evidenced by customer partnerships that span many years. For more information, please visit www.persistentsys.com.

For more information contact:

One Million by One Million

Maureen Kelly
(908) 953-0602
maureen@sramanamitra.com

Persistent Systems

Pinal Patil
+91-99229-27191
pinal_patil@persistent.co.in

CrowdEngineering

press@crowdengineering.com