The 20th edition of the VARINDIA INFOTECH FORUM 2022 that was held in New Delhi on 5th August, 2022 was an eye-opener in many ways than one – it set a new benchmark for insightful discussions on digital transformation and disruptive trends that would drive the future. It also saw power-packed sessions of technical presentations, panel discussions and discourses on issues impacting the technology landscape and, most importantly business networking, nearly after two years of holding this prestigious event virtually because of the pandemic.
Having entered its 20th year, the hybrid event was designed around the theme – ‘Optimizing the world of remote work’. The forum was attended by 400 regulators, Policy makers, along with experts in technology, CIO/CTO/CDO and over 80 delegates from the OEMs. During the sessions there were various discussions on how the core technologies have created the new vision to think ahead.
The eminent dignitaries who were present during the lamp-lighting ceremony in the morning session include Vijay Sethi, Digital Transformation & Sustainability Evangelist; Dr. Biswajit Mohapatra, Head Customer Solutions Management- AWS; Deepak Sar, Director (Distribution & Alliance) - Hitachi Vantara; Jagannath Sahoo, Head Service Delivery & Operation - Cyber Security- Bharati Airtel; Mohit Puri, Country Manager (India & SAARC) – SonicWall; Shri Sanjay Kumar Das, State Information Security Officer & Joint Secretary, Dept. of IT & E, Govt of West Bengal; Ramkumar Mohan, CIO – AIR WORKS INDIA; Dr Mukesh Mehta, Group CIO, Monarch Networth Capital; Sandip Kothari, GM-IT, ORA Jewellery; Kapil Mehrotra, Group CTO- NCMS Ltd; Varundeep Kaur, CIO-Spice Money; Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, Publisher & Chief Editor, VARINDIA & Group of Publications; and S Mohini Ratna, Editor-VARINDIA.
In his opening speech, Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu spoke about how digital technologies have advanced more rapidly than any innovation in the history of mankind. “Initially, a decade back we thought about how to secure and enhance productivity of the organisations but now we are seeing how technology has made communication unbelievably fast and convenient. It has paved the way for multi-functional devices like the smartwatch and the smartphone. With all of these revolutions, technology has also made our lives easier, faster, better, and more fun.”
Pavan Duggal, Cyber Security Law expert was the next speaker, who shared valuable inputs on cyber security and laws. “It is a different world altogether. When I talk about the cybersecurity landscape, what hits me is that in the last 24 hours, we have seen a U-turn in the Govt. of India. After five years of working on the Personal Protection Bill, they decided to unilaterally withdraw the bill. A lot of hours, months, years that went into deliberating it, first in the form of the Justice Srikrishna Committee and thereafter the joint Parliamentary Committee have all come to a grinding halt. As the government says, it will come up with a new law now. That is one side of the perspective. On the other hand, as the govt. says, the old law was not sufficient enough and the new law is going to cover not just personal data but sensitive personal data. So now a new ecosystem is going to be prepared. Let’s be prepared for a humongous legislation that is going to come up and the need for tightening our belts is going to be very high.”
Sanjay Kumar Das, State Information Security Officer & Joint Secretary, Dept. of IT & E, Govt of West Bengal spoke at length on Democracy in data governance. “When we attend any conference or meeting, we are asked to register ourselves by submitting our name, email id and phone number and the organizers reason with us saying that it will be used for internal purposes. But what if the information is misused, and there are higher chances that they can fall in wrong hands. Many a time, we are asked for our Aadhaar number too, which amounts to handing out our identity. We often face this dilemma of whether we should give out our personal details or not. In data governance, if you want to bring democracy, you need to abide by certain principles. If I do not require, I need not collect such data. Just imagine, all those registers lying there, anyone can go and take a snap. Corona has made us visit a lot of doctors in the last two years. All your records are online nowadays and just by logging in your name, the doctor will come to know whatever medical conditions you have. This is both a boon and a bane.”
In the corporate presentations, Deepak Sar, Director, Distribution & Alliance from Hitachi Vantara focused on the brand’s strong vision of aligning its partners and customer ecosystem towards a common goal of doing profitable business. “There was a gentleman in the IT industry who once said that data is the new oil. But I don’t buy that statement, as I don’t consider data to be the new oil. It is my personal opinion that data is the sun, as oil can get depleted after a point of time. But the sun is the constant source of energy and so is data. Secondly, data is the King, as everybody is in search of more and more data. The richness of an organization or the richness of any of the unicorns that we have now is determined by how much data they are in possession of or how much transaction they are doing. So it is data that everybody is talking about. It was good to be data rich at one point in time, but it is no longer. The time has moved from being data rich to data driven.”
Mohit Puri, Country Manager (India & SAARC) - SonicWall through his presentation highlighted how SonicWall is on the forefront of offering boundless security, analyzing every threat and cyberattack. “The last two and a half years, we have gone through our journey of both good and bad times. People have lost their near and dear ones, but nevertheless going strong from strength to strength. Going forward, our approach will be absolutely boundless. We cannot be working from one single console like we used to do. You are no longer required to go back to the office and your work starts wherever your laptop is. The IT landscape has changed and the prime focus is to secure ourselves, our networks, and data; that has been on the top of SonicWall’s mind. We also have been facing a lot of challenges, whether it is distributed IT reality or explosion of the exposure points, or the cloud which is becoming very pervasive. We are seeing a lot of customers transforming from on-prem to cloud because of lack of good resources. They want to leverage the cloud platform. On top of that there have been a lot of compliances and regulations.”
Sharing valuable insights, Prof Triveni Singh, Superintendent of Police, Cyber Crime, Uttar Pradesh explained how important it is to be extra cautious in this cyber world while sending messages and mails. “With advancing technology, cyber criminals are also getting smarter technologically. Every day we get SMSs of part-time jobs or instant loan applications etc. Nobody can expect that an SMS can be a big crime where people lost Rs 50,000 - Rs 2.5 lakh and if we calculate it for the entire country, then it will be a huge amount. To regulate the bulk SMS industry, the Department of Telecommunications has come up with a DLT platform. It is a blockchain based platform and is formed to control cybercrimes. People receive an SMS which reads - Flipkart is urgently recruiting and mentions the maximum daily salary. A victim also received such an SMS and filed an FIR as the lady lost Rs 2.2 lakh. If you want to send bulk SMS then you require three things, first you have to have an entity – it can be an individual, firm etc. and it should be registered. If the entity wants to send bulk SMS then it asks for a code from the telecom operator and for this, documentation must be submitted. According to government policy, the text of the SMS must also be validated, verified and approved. If anyone searches for part-time on Google then the paid advertisements appear first and the cyber criminals are taking advantage of that. The link opens to a WhatsApp number and the chat starts and they take it to Telegram and provide a virtual payment address and ask for some amount that will get doubled etc. Lakhs of cyber criminals are running paid advertisements on Google and their links appear first on the search engine. Thousands of people are thus becoming victims of such malicious ads.”
Naved Chaudhary, Head of Marketing- Ingram Micro India spoke about how the company facilitated remote work and how the industry optimised it to its best use. “As we all know that technology is at the heart of any remote work initiatives we are taking. Without technology it may not be possible and clubbing with the internet is what the solution that we are giving to the larger audience. In the last two years, during and after the pandemic, we have seen the changes it brings to the table. We moved to virtual conferences and after a few months we realised it's not going to do well and we have to change the way we operate in terms of engagements. A lot of solutions, including hybrid models came in. We keep a tap of it and offer relevant products. During the pandemic and after that the companies have completely changed their digital strategy. There are more people within marketing and organizations are into the digital space. Nine years back the marketing spend used to be just four percent, but now it is moving to 20-24 percent with some of the categories spending up to 50-70 percent also. The Internet and technology are transforming businesses across the globe.”
Dr. Harold D’Costa, President - Cyber Security Corporation enlightened the audience on various types of data frauds happening on a regular basis.
Satyakam Jyotiprakash, Harmony Security Lead, India & SAARC- Checkpoint Software shared many important security aspects that were worth listening to.
Sabyasachi, CTO - SDG Corporation and Meetali Sharma, Head-Risk, Compliance & Information Security - SDG Corporation shared the stage to present their viewpoints.
The evening session commenced with an opening note by S Mohini Ratna, Editor-VARINDIA. In her speech she spoke about the journey of VARINDIA and Brand Book that have successfully been serving the Indian ICT industry for the last 23 Years. While delving into the theme of the event, she said, “Today's workers demand flexibility. Remote work also offers employees more flexibility and the ability to maintain a better work-life balance, which benefits companies in the long run. Some companies still believe remote work leads to waste of time and lack of productivity, but this old-fashioned stigma has been proven incorrect.”
The Chief Guest for the evening, Dr. Amar Patnaik, Member of Parliament, Rajya Sabha gave his keynote address in which he enlightened the audience with his insightful thoughts and ideas.
The last two corporate presentations in the evening were given by Tushar Mehrotra, Pre-sales Lead - Redington India Ltd. and Manmohan Brahma, Manager - Solutions Architect- AMD - India Mega Region.
S N Tripathi (IAS), Director General-IIPA, Government of India also addressed the audience with his inspiring speech, as well as Rajesh Aggarwal, IAS-Secretary- Skills Development, Government of India, who graced the occasion and shared a brief message with the audience present.
There were a total of three panel discussions held during the course of the full-day event. The Session – I panel discussion was around the theme ‘Ensuring a reliable digital connectivity to every Indian’ and was moderated by Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, Publisher & Chief Editor, VARINDIA & Group of Publications. The panellists who joined the session are - Vijay Sethi, Digital transformation and sustainability evangelist; Dr. Biswajit Mohapatra, Head Customer Solutions Management- AWS; Kapil Mehrotra, Group CTO -National Collateral Management Services Ltd.; Sanjeev Sinha, President- Digital Transformation, IPCL; Varundeep Kaur, CIO- Spice Money and Yogesh Dadke, APAC IT Leader - ADIENT India.
The second panel discussion of the 20th edition of the INFOTECH Forum was around the topic ‘Technology Is Getting Personalised Again’ which was also moderated by Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, Publisher & Chief Editor, VARINDIA & Group of Publications. The Session-II panel saw Chief marketing Officers and Head of marketing joining the discussion as panellists. They were - Rahul Singh, VP & Head of Marketing- SAP India; Naved Chaudhary, Head of Marketing- Ingram Micro; Nikhil Dudwadkar, Head of Marketing- Kaspersky; Prasenjeet Roy, CMO- NTT Global; Vinny Sharma, Director Marketing Asia Pacific Japan and ME- Securonix and Anita Kukreja, Head of Marketing & Channel Sales – IceWarp.
The third panel discussion was themed ‘Building a Cyber Safe India’, which was again moderated by Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, Publisher & Chief Editor, VARINDIA & Group of Publications. The panellists included CISOs/CDOs and security experts from the industry joining like Dr. Harold D’Costa, President- Cyber Security Corporation; Sanjay Kumar Das, State Information Security Officer & Joint Secretary, Dept. of IT & E, Govt of West Bengal; Bharat B Anand, V.P-Technology- EC Council Group; Subroto Panda, CIO- ANAND & ANAND; Karnika Seth, Cyber lawyer & Expert- Seth Associates; Krunal Patel, MD, India and Middle East – SafeBreach; Sourav das, CDIO - Aditya Birla Group Essel Mining & Industries.
The unveiling of the 11th edition of the VARINDIA Brand Book on the Indian ICT Industry was however the major attraction, which kept the audience glued to their seats. The Annual Coffee Table Book brings insights into the visionary leadership behind the featured brands: Chronicling the journeys, marketing and channel policy along with the GTM strategy of the Corporates and VARs that participated in the Brand Book.
The event also witnessed the recognition of 102 Eminent CIOs of India, India’s Top 25 Trusted Brands along with the country’s Top 50 Most Admired ICT Brands, the Most Influential CMOs and lastly the Women in Technology Leadership 2022.
There were also four lucky draws announced that saw winners from the audience winning many exciting prizes.
The event was supported by Presenting Partner Redington, Principal Partners Hitachi Vantara and AMD, Platinum Partner Ingram Micro, the Gold partner Snowflake and Checkpoint. In the Networking Partner category there are seven corporates – NEC, Sophos, Veeam, SonicWall, Rubrik, Viewsoinic and SDG Corporation. The cyber Security partner of the IT Forum was Kaspersky.
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