Sand Hill Group Announces First Annual Awards for Software Industry Good Samaritans, Social Entrepreneurs and Luminary; Winners Recognized At Software 2006 Gala Benefit; Awards Celebrate Philanthropy in the Software Industry Ecosystem.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Sand Hill Group last night announced the winners of the first annual SHG Foundation awards for software industry Good Samaritans, Social Entrepreneurship and Luminary. At a gala benefit event in conjunction with Software 2006 this week, awards were given to eight organizations and people across the three categories.

Sand Hill Good Samaritans

-- LiveOps (www.liveops.com)

-- Sahana (www.sahana.lk)

-- Santa Clara University's Center for Science, Technology, and Society (http://www.scu.edu/sts/programsandpartnerships/gsbincubator.cfm)

Sand Hill Social Entrepreneurs 

-- Suzanne McKechnie Klahr, BUILD (www.build.org)

-- David Green, Project Impact (www.project-impact.net)

-- John Wood, Room to Read (www.roomtoread.org)

-- Vikram Akula, SKS Microfinance (www.sksindia.com)

The Sand Hill Luminary Award was given to FC Kohli, founder in 1968 of Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and considered the father of Indian IT. CK Prahalad, highly-decorated business thought leader and distinguished professor, made a tribute and presented the award to FC Kohli on stage last night. The Luminary Award is given to an individual who has dramatically improved people's lives. TCS envisioned and pioneered the adoption of the flexible global business practices that today enable companies to operate more efficiently and produce more value. Known as the "global delivery model," this delivery concept has reshaped the IT services industry and enabled employment for thousands of people.

"As software industry entrepreneurs and investors it's important that we give back to our community and at Sand Hill we have had a philanthropic mission since we started our events almost 10 years ago," said M.R. Rangaswami, co-founder of the Sand Hill Group. "The SHG Foundation annual awards allow us to look at a wider array of organizations, including those that combine social and technology vision. It is a great pleasure to recognize these forward thinking individuals and companies, all of whom reflect a spirit of selfless giving and sacrifice and who help complete the software industry ecosystem."

The SHG Foundation Good Samaritans

Good Samaritan awards were given to three organizations that have substantially aided emergency or disaster victims and helped other non-profit organizations.

LiveOps is a for profit provider of distributed call centers that aided Hurricane Katrina victims by setting up a call center for the Red Cross and a toll free number for victims. More than 200,000 phone calls placed to the national Family Link service have reunited over 17,000 family members and friends since September 2, 2005. LiveOps will donate their cash award to the Red Cross.

Sahana's Free and Open Source (FOSS) project was quickly built over a 2-3 week period around the time of the tsunami in Asia to help coordinate the relief effort in Sri Lanka. Sahana's FOSS project facilitates online management of missing person, organization, camp registries and request management systems. In addition to its work assisting tsunami victims, Sahana's FOSS project was used to great effect in the recent Pakistan earthquake and Philippines mudslides.

Santa Clara University's Center for Science, Technology, and Society, in partnership with the Leavey School of Business Administration, has developed the Global Social Benefit Incubator (GSBI) program. GSBI recruits award-winning, socially conscious innovators from around the globe and provides them with knowledge, skills and mentoring support they need to develop business models that are more likely to attract funding and generate the critical resources for achieving sustainability at scale. With its intensive two-week residential program, world-class partnerships, and access to Silicon Valley resources, GSBI's "business boot camp" empowers program participants' to advance their social enterprises through technological and business model innovations that address urgent human concerns throughout the world.

The SHG Foundation Social Entrepreneurs

Social Entrepreneurship awards were given to four organizations whose chief executive officers have left highly profitable jobs in technology and other professions to start a non-profit because of their passionate belief in a cause.

Suzanne McKechnie Klahr graduated from Stanford Law School at the height of the dot-com boom and passed up a lucrative opportunity at one of the nation's most prestigious law firms to start BUILD, a social venture which bridges the divide between youth and business in the Bay Area. BUILD empowers academically struggling youth from low-income communities to excel in the classroom, on the job, and beyond by giving them an education in entrepreneurship through all four years of high school. Suzanne began the program with four students and now serves over 200 in multiple low-income communities. To date, 100 percent of BUILD graduates have gone to college.

David Green, of Project Impact, is devoted to making technology and healthcare services accessible, affordable, and financially self-sustaining. David and many international partners, including Seva Foundation, helped establish an independent non-profit company in India called Aurolab that makes intraocular lenses -- plastic implants that restore sight to cataract patients -- and in the process lowered the cost from $300 to three dollars. Aurolab is one of the largest intraocular lens companies and has sold over 5 million to 120 countries since its inception. He has helped many eye care programs in India, Nepal, Egypt, Malawi, Tanzania and Guatemala become self financing from user fees but still oriented to serving the lower economic strata, proving a model of sustainability that can be applied to other arenas.

John Wood left his executive position as Microsoft's Director of Business Development in China to start Room to Read, an organization dedicated to bringing the lifelong gift of education to at least 10 million children in the developing world. Since its inception in 2000, Room to Read has impacted the lives of over 805,000 children by constructing a network of over 200 schools and 2,500 multi-lingual libraries with 1.2 million books. They have also awarded over 1,800 long-term scholarships for girls from adverse economic circumstances. John's book -- Leaving Microsoft to Change the World -- will be published by Harper Collins in August.

Vikram Akula founded SKS Microfinance in India, a company that empowers the poor to become economically self-reliant by providing collateral-free financial services in a sustainable manner. Since 1998, SKS has delivered over $52 million in microfinance to over 200,000 women clients in poor regions of India. In the last year alone, SKS grew by nearly 300% and has a current portfolio of $23 million with a 99% on-time repayment rate. Vikram is a former consultant with McKinsey & Co in the United States. He was a Fulbright Scholar and has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, an M.A. from Yale, and B.A. from Tufts.

About Sand Hill Group

Sand Hill Group serves the $600+ billion software, services and solutions market by providing investment and management advice to emerging enterprise technology leaders. Sand Hill also owns Sandhill.com -- the premier destination site and resource center for CEOs, VPs, Entrepreneurs, VCs and for members of the software industry eco-system. Its weekly electronic newsletter is read by thousands of executives. Sand Hill produces the 'Enterprise' and 'Software' conferences for CEOs and executives in the industry and creates high-impact research reports for its constituents.

Sand Hill Group created the SHG Foundation to enable the surplus from its annual Enterprise Conference to be donated to charity. The goal is to build a $1 million endowment. The annual SHG Foundation awards include grants to non-profit organizations, which help to improve the lives of low-income women and children worldwide. See http://www.sandhill.com/sandhillgroup/foundation.php.

More information can be found at www.sandhill.com.