SNIA's XAM Initiative Sponsors the 2009 TopCoder Open

First-ever SNIA software coding challenge offers prize money and industry-wide recognition for XAM developers participating in TopCoder's global competition

San Francisco, Calif. (March 3, 2009) — The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) today announced its first XAM Coding Challenge, an event specifically designed for software programmers who are interested in creating innovative applications with the eXtensible Access Method (XAM) specification. The challenge will offer SNIA XAM tools and training to assist contestants with their content submissions. SNIA is partnering with TopCoder, the world’s largest competitive software development community, on the challenge. Ideas Competition winners of the SNIA XAM Coding Challenge will be announced at the TopCoder Open 2009, June 1–4, at the Mirage hotel in Las Vegas, Nev; the software winners of the SNIA XAM Coding Challenge will be announced at SNIA’s Storage Developers Conference, Sept. 14–18, San Jose, Calif.

The TopCoder Open targets the best programming minds, and challenges them to a head–to–head competition. SNIA is a sponsor of the challenge, and will assist with judging submissions for the XAM Coding Challenge, which will consist of two parts, the Ideas Competition and the Prototyping Competition. Requirements for submission are:

• Ideas Competition: Submit ideas on the types of applications that can and should be developed using the XAM Application Programming Interface (API).
• Prototype Contest: By utilizing one or more of the winning submissions from the Ideas Competition, a software working prototype will be created using the XAM API.

"SNIA is eager to engage a broad and diverse global programmer community through the XAM Coding Challenge," said Wayne M. Adams, Chair of the SNIA. " We hope to stimulate XAM ideas and implementations for applications, including digital preservation and archiving, electronic health records, e-discovery and cloud storage as well as the traditional ISV applications such as managing and storing fixed content data."

The SNIA XAM Initiative volunteers will support the developer community throughout all phases of the XAM Coding Challenge, through its Developer Group, with resources including the XAM specification, the XAM software developers kit, XAM training, tools and access to the experts.

To enter the XAM Coding Challenge, please register on the TopCoder Open 2009 Web site at http://www.topcoder.com/tco09.

Information about the SNIA XAM specification and the SNIA XAM Initiative can be found at the following Web sites:

• SNIA XAM Developers Group – http://groups.google.com/group/xam-developers-group
• SNIA XAM Initiative – /forums/xam

For more information on the SNIA, please visit www.snia.org

About the SNIA
The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) is a not–for–profit global organization, made up of some 400 member companies spanning virtually the entire storage industry. SNIA’s mission is to lead the storage industry worldwide in developing and promoting standards, technologies, and educational services to empower organizations in the management of information. To this end, the SNIA is uniquely committed to delivering standards, education, and services that will propel open storage networking solutions into the broader market. For additional information, visit the SNIA web site at www.snia.org.