PANJIM: The crème-de-la-crème of the Indian IT professionals who attended the 5th edition CIO India Conclave that concluded in Goa recently, sent a very positive vibe to the IT community in the State. Unlike a regular seminar this initiative featured a perfect combination of interactive panel discussions, tech talks, keynote presentations and pre-scheduled one-to-one business meetings. Most importantly the conclave certainly helped building up of State’s image leading to a thought that Goa too can become an IT hub.
Several leading companies did make their presence felt in terms of participation and many of these did show their keen interest to further their business in Goa. “In Goa during 2005 we saw a great amount of opportunity for becoming an IT hub which eventually slumped. But now, the recent wave of start-ups which we are observing now, assures us that it can really take on this time. We have our footprints right now in Tier-I cities and surely our next move will be to move into the Tier-II cities and Goa as a state should not be away from our thought process,” said Sunil Kumar Raja, Vice President of Hyderabad based company CtrlS.
The conclave took off with the chairperson Vipul Anand, the Group Chief Information Officer at Jindal Steel and Power Limited welcoming the attendees. One of the highlights was an opening keynote by Pavan Duggal, the President or Cyberlaws.net and Advocate at Supreme Court of India. In his presentation he apprised the audience about the Indian cyber law compliances and what the country’s CIOs need to be aware of concerning the subject. This was followed by an interesting tech-talk on ‘Enterprise Collaboration and Communication’ presented by Shailesh Dudani, chief sales officer at Flock.
Representatives of Flock, Anand N K Vig and Beezan Charna, both senior associate directors of the company, said that, “Of course we will be interested in coming to Goa. We, gave a demo to Vedanta and have received a very encouraging response from them. We are open for company adoption anywhere in India including Goa which is always in the heart of all Indians.”
Flock is a Mumbai-based 350 million dollar group which develops communication tools for internal as well as external communications and expertises in heavy file sharing capabilities upto 100 MB.
Some of the leading technology providers who supported the event delivered elevator pitches that included Puja Mathur, the Country Manager (India) at Diligent, who talked about ‘Paperless Board Meeting’; Ajit Pillai, the Director Sales – India Region at Check Point Software Technologies (India) Pvt Ltd who talked about ‘Advanced Threat Protection in the Disruptive Era’; Sunil Kumar Raja, VP (Sales) at CtrlS who talked about The Changing Relevance of a Datacenter and Managed Services Provider; and Hive Technology shared about their solutions on ‘Connecting people, animals and objects to the ‘Internet of Things’.
Puja Mathur, country manager, Diligent, a 15 year old organisation headquartered in US, told Herald that, “We are here in Goa to showcase our product and the response that we received is fairly good, encouraging and people are evaluating such a solution. This is for the first time we are participating in a conclave. Earlier it was purely by the word of mouth.”
She added that Diligent is specially focused for bringing solution for the Board Members. “Paper use can lead to security breach and hence the company has developed a simple and secure usage of technology. Germany and Canada will host the data as the privacy laws are of very high standards in these two countries. We have 600 customers already and their data is hosted either in Germany or Canada. Data is more secure in a cloud than in a server,” Puja Mathur added.
The need for ‘thinking futuristic and implementing today’ to stay ahead in the game was one of the popular points discussed during the conclave. The two-day event was organised by Trescon, one of India’s leading full service B2B event management company. More than 60 Chief Information Officers, Chief Technology Officers and technology heads from cross vertical industry sectors in India met privately to discuss current technology trends and challenges as well as shared their best practices.
