GlobalRoads Inc., a rapidly growing US-based provider of sales automation services and open source solutions, unveiled its innovative e-commerce recommendation technology to participate in the Netflix Prize. The GlobalRoads system significantly outperforms Netflix's internal recommendation engine in prediction accuracy and is currently on the Netflix Leaderboard among the top 40.

"It's already a great technical achievement with just our initial efforts in this space, given there are more than 18000 contestants from 125 different countries participating in this contest and companies like Netflix and Amazon have heavily invested over the last decade in such technologies," Vivek Sagi, co-founder and VP, Business & Technology Solutions, GlobalRoads stated.

GlobalRoads is a strong proponent and early mover in building commercial open source software, which is rapidly gaining momentum as a viable alternative to high-cost proprietary systems.

According to Brad Newton, co-founder and president, GlobalRoads , "Active open source communities are critical to low cost innovation and to drive adoption. As evident from the Netflix competition, small teams have proven to be nimble and have quickly surpassed what big corporations can achieve. To engender such community effects we established SmartGRAPE, an open source initiative to bring together a global community of talented domain experts and software engineers to collaboratively develop a superior online shopping recommendation system."

During 2007, GlobalRoads plans to rapidly expand its R&D and services delivery capability in Hyderabad, India. The current partnership with Innominds Inc. gives GlobalRoads flexible capacity to source high quality resources at a competitive cost.