21st VARINDIA INFOTECH FORUM: Underscoring the Essence of Digital Transformation

The 21st edition of the VARINDIA INFOTECH FORUM 2023, a day-long hybrid forum held in the national capital of New Delhi on 21st July has set a new benchmark of being a prestigious end-customer event. Themed this year - Optimizing Digital Transformation, the carefully curated event saw power-packed sessions of technical presentations, panel discussions and discourses on issues impacting the technology landscape and, most importantly business networking.   

Now in its 21st year, the forum manifested itself as the perfect opportunity for enterprise-level decision-makers to explore and evaluate new technologies and strategic approaches to drive innovation in their business, through day-long discourses and discussions. Living up to its tradition of positioning as a knowledge sharing platform, INFOTECH FORUM 2023 witnessed experts from the industry, academia and the marketing leaders from corporate world participating in company presentations, insightful speeches, besides the three tracks of panel discussion sessions.  

The eminent guests present at the event included Sanjay Kumar Das, MD -WEBEL; Manoj Chugh, Advisory LLP; Vijay Sethi, Chairman- Mentorkart; Prof Triveni Singh, Superintendent of Police, Cyber Crime, Uttar Pradesh; Rishi Mehta, President & CEO- WAISL Limited; Manoj Kumar, ED & Head of International Marketing- BEL, Subhashish Gupta, Country Manager India & SAARC, Allied Telesys; Dr. Pavan Duggal, Expert in Cyberlaw and e-commerce law- Supreme Court of India; Dr. Ajai Garg, Director & Head (Tech & Law)- Anand & Anand , Dr Debabrata Nayak, Head of Cyber Security- Ericsson; Dr. Karnika Seth, Managing Partner- Seth Associates; Col. (DR) Inderjeet Singh, Chief Cyber Officer- Vara Technology; Saurabh Gupta, Group CDIO - Gujarat Fluorochemicals Ltd.; Kumar Ravi, CISO-Teleperformance India; Rohit Raman, Managing Partner & APAC Head- Etek; Mohit Puri, Country Manager India/SAARC, SonicWall; Nikhil Dudwadkar, Head of Marketing, Kaspersky; Atul Govil, Chief Transformation Officer & Head (SAP & IT) - India Glycols; Sanjeev Sinha, President- IT & Digitisation- India Power Corporation Ltd.; Dr. Sindhu Bhaskar, CEO - EST Group; Vijay Anand, Sr. V.P. Global IT & IS – CorroHealth; Kapil Mehrotra, Group CTO - Dhanuka Group; Pankaj Mittal, Founder & CEO- Digizen Consulting; Rahul Dutta, Country Head- Microsoft Surface; Ritesh Dhawan, General Manager - Redington Ltd.; Anita Kukreja, Head - Marketing & Channel Sales- IceWarp India; Nationalist Umesh Gopinath Jadhav; Dr.Deepak Kumar Sahu, Editor-in-chief, VARINDIA; and S Mohini Ratna, Editor – VARINDIA. 

CIOs spending in technologies that enable automation and efficiency with fewer employees   

Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu   
Editor-in-chief-VARINDIA and Group of Publications   

In the inaugural speech, Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, Editor-in-chief, VARINDIA and Group Publications, while expressing his gratitude towards the audience, explained how the tech leaders are struggling to adopt new age technologies, implementing new business models, creating new organizational structures, and making their processes more intelligent. 
“Our world is changing, our clients’ business needs are changing, processes are changing – and there are trends that are impacting not only the way our clients are thinking about the industries they are in and the customers they serve, but also how they run their businesses.  As companies continue to operate in a volatile, uncertain and lower-growth world, they are forced to completely transform their businesses by making them nimbler, with cost structures that are lower and much more variable. 

We are witnessing how the tech leaders are struggling to adopt new age technologies, implementing new business models, creating new organizational structures, and making their processes more intelligent. And above all – they are looking for partners who can help them navigate their transformation journeys. Talking about a data point, Worldwide IT spending is projected to total $4.7 trillion in 2023, an increase of 4.3% from 2022. As CIOs continue to lose the competition for IT talent, they are shifting to spending in technologies that enable automation and efficiency to drive growth at scale with fewer employees. Indeed, a strong technology ecosystem is essential for growth. It provides companies with the resources and support they need to innovate and succeed. Technology has been at the heart of business continuity in challenging times. The VARINDIA Most Trusted Companies and Most Admired Brands 2023 is an endeavour to commemorate the most path breaking technology brands in India’s business landscape.” 

The robust infrastructure that CIOs built ensured business continuity during the pandemic    

Manoj Chugh
Chairman - Manoj Chugh Advisory LLP  

“I would like to go back to the pandemic and understand how it was a big catalyst to digital transformation and how a big realization slowly dawned upon us that even without turning up at office, day-to-day work just continued to happen. That was a big learning for many of us. But I don't know how many of us really step back and ask ourselves a question that how did that magic happen - when all of us were studying from home, entertaining ourselves from home, working from home, buying things online. How many organizations actually prepared themselves in terms of business continuity and disaster recovery drills of having 100% of their employees working from home, and yet the business continued unabated? When I asked CIOs this question, almost everyone answered that neither in their business continuity nor disaster recovery strategies had they ever factored for the reality of everyone working from home. But yet, we all say that people were far more productive during those unfortunate months. If we reflect back and realize that with no drills done to prepare businesses for such an eventuality, yet our businesses continued during such times, then I think that credit really goes to all the CIOs. CIOs, over the many years in a steadfast fashion, built robust, bullet-proof infrastructure within their organizations, which enabled all of us to work productively from home. So, I would like to thank all the CIOs for doing a phenomenal job. I would also want to thank the partner community, because without building an ecosystem, without all of us coming together, working along with the CIOs and working along with the IT organizations, none of this would have been possible.” 

Digital transformation is a never-ending process that goes on for lifetime 

Rishi Mehta  
President & CEO- WAISL Limited 

“If you are really serious about transformation, you have to accomplish the goal that you have set forth. So, this is the message with which you begin your digital transformation journey. It is a never-ending process but you will have to very passionate about it; otherwise, it will be a challenging journey ahead. When I came back to India, we worked with one of the companies where not only we had to transform the company digitally but also help the customers who were going through a transformation journey. And the customers that I have are physical infrastructure customers like airports. This was one onerous task we had, since they did not quite understand lot of technology jargons or how this will help with their business outcomes. Some of the learnings that I had was that you have to constantly focus on the business needs. The company that I am very fortunate to lead is WAISL, a digital airport company. We do end-to-end service all the way from IT operations of the airport, to managing IT which is required to run the airport 24x7. So, technologies like switch router, IoT sensor, Wi Fi, 4G, upcoming 5G systems, firewalls, are deployed there. We also bring a lot of digital interventions, some are done in-house, while some through the partners. We have learned quite a lot actually by serving up 100 million passengers annually. This tells you how much insights we have been able to develop basically over the course of time. This company is 10 years old. We went through the journey of serving Delhi airport and Hyderabad airport and then we started winning some other projects like in Singapore, Kuwait.

We are in the midst of ChatGPT today that accelerated the journey from AI to generative intelligence  

Sanjay Kumar Das  
MD - WEBEL (WBEIDCL) & Joint Secretary, IT& Electronics Department, West Bengal  

“Digital transformation is not for today or tomorrow but it is forever that one should look at. It is upon us how we adopt or embrace it. Every government entity has understood it and almost all of them are at different stages of this transformation journey. We are today in the midst of ChatGPT which has accelerated the journey from AI to generative AI. When we are talking of the benefits of artificial intelligence, we are actually talking about the competition between man and machine. There has been this candid discussion across many forums that machine will be overtaking men. But I have a different view. Man creates the machine, so the machine can therefore never surpass man’s wisdom. If man has created machine, then he/she also does not know what he/she is capable of. So, the fathom of intelligence and knowledge of man might actually come back and show like a machine has become a sentiment. Nearly 10-15 years back, there was a movie of Tom Cruise called Minority Report, which talked about artificial intelligence, general intelligence and human intelligence. The film showed that humans in a condition of trans collectively creating an intelligence and alerting the law enforcement agencies before any bad things take place. So even if we allow machines to learn, it cannot surpass the unfathomable intelligence and wisdom of man. Only two days back, there was this news that hit the headlines of how ChatGPT accounts were hacked and nearly one lakh user data got compromised. I would quote Professor Noam Chomsky, who says that to bring awareness is the responsibility of the government.”

There is a strong convergence between IT & OT systems while building smart networks  

Subhashish Gupta  
Country Manager India & SAARC, Allied Telesys   

“There is a very blurring gap between an IT and OT network. Till recently we used to talk about IT networks to be driven by the CIOs of the organization or the CXOs of the organization or a VP-IT and then there was operational technologies network which was being driven by somebody else. But today there is a blurring gap. There is a strong convergence in terms of the best practices that you need to consider while building your smart networks. So, there are five typical key pain points which any organization faces with respect to its network infrastructure. One is the Technology device failure; Cybersecurity – a big subject matter and is crucial from a network infrastructure point of view; Disaster - what if your hardware based controller fails, does it mean that all your IP applications go for a toss; Human error that you can't forget that when you are building processes or during deploying complex systems, there is a relevance of human error which comes into picture; and the ISP outages. So, if your network infrastructure is down for a minute, the average loss that Gartner defines on a per minute basis is $5,600. So that's the kind of impact which businesses have. So, what are the outcomes expected as a CIO or CEO or somebody who's having a team and is aspiring to build a complete smart network infrastructure? When I mentioned about technology device failure, we are talking about automated recovery. It implies how fast your network infrastructure recovers if there is an outage. This is where the concept of a platform which offers you a seamless kind of experience where human interference or involvement is very limited, comes into the picture.” 

Hybrid cloud is the present and the future for enterprises 

Anuj Kumar Singh
Senior Solution Specialist, Hitachi Vantara   
“Hitachi group is a group of diverse companies operating into diverse fields, including transport, railways, and IT. We have more than 110 years of experience in operational technology, and more than 40 years of experience in IT. We are together developing solutions, with our experience in the operational technology, and the type of challenges that customers face. We are creating joint solutions and sharing with our customers. We spend close to $4 billion annually on R&D. Hitachi Vantara is the digital engine is responsible for creating the IT solutions along with these operation technologies. Moving to and operating in highly distributed IT environment is a must thing for all the data driven enterprises today. From surveys we have seen that approximately 90% of enterprises have already realized of how to operate on these multiple clouds. These enterprises are not only looking at multiple clouds, but they are expecting an approach where applications and the critical data can leverage the IT infrastructure present on their private cloud, as well as public cloud seamlessly. Secondly, they wanted to run their applications and these workloads on a private cloud, but also wanted to leverage infrastructure on the public cloud so as to meet the occasional spikes in their workload or whenever their traffic grows. There are many companies already adopting this strategy and there are many more who are joining this hybrid cloud to meet the goal of digital transformation. So hybrid cloud is the present and the future.”  

Cybersecurity awareness among smartphone users is still low 

Naveen Kumar  
Sales Director, North & East - Sophos India 

“Everybody is seen with a smartphone or a mobility device nowadays. But the question which arises is that out of these 600 million users, how many of them are aware about cyber security. If we are not secured on the cyber front, then how will we understand the disadvantages and losses that need to be borne. It is not only the loss of data but the prestige of the organization comes at stake during an event of cyber incident. When we target something big, what kind of a vision should we have. In my opinion, the eagle has the vision and target that extends even beyond 5 kms. The CIO and the CISO community has that similar kind of vision. They can sense threats even six months prior. The development team at Sophos also has this vision as they continue to study the market, take insights of how frequently the attacks happen and accordingly keep on enhancing our products. There were surveys conducted by us in the beginning of this financial year in the APAC region, with over more than 15,000 CIOs. The survey reveals that 93% of the surveyed have experienced a cyber-attack of some form, while 63% of the IT professionals always say that they don't want to spend time on such ongoing issues. The average time taken to identify an issue is 9 hours. For an organization between 3000 and 10,000 users is even higher - the average time to identify that incident is 15 hours.”

Panel discussion I: ‘Accelerating Data-Driven Growth’ 

The first panel was moderated by Vijay Sethi, Chairman- Mentorkart and it highlighted how CIOs/CTOs are utilizing data to efficiently drive business growth, innovation, and decision-making, while leveraging analytical techniques to gain insights, make informed strategic choices, and optimize business operations.  
Accelerating data-driven growth has become increasingly important in today's digital age. CTOs are now responsible for driving innovation, developing and executing a technology strategy, and aligning technology initiatives with business goals. They also play a key role in digital transformation, helping organizations to adopt new technologies and processes that can improve efficiency, productivity, and customer experience. 

Vijay Sethi opened the session by stating about the importance of data and how it is going to change the world when put analytics on top of it. “Since I have been working with a lot of start-ups, I have seen the valuation of many of these companies going up just because they possess a lot of data. Data is also bringing a lot of change to the business models of organizations, both at the organizational and the strategic level. It helps businesses to analyze what went wrong and how something can be done right.”   

Sanjeev Sinha, President- IT & Digitisation- India Power Corporation Ltd. harped on the importance of data while sharing some use cases that stressed on this important role played by data in the life of an organization today. “We know if data is there and it has to be analyzed, we can get lot of insights. In the power sector, the government has embarked on what is called smart meters, which capture data on a more regular basis as compared to an analogue meter. It will transmit data at an interval of 15 minutes. At the end of the day, the data collected is ensured to translate to customer satisfaction and delight.”  

Kapil Mehrotra, Group CTO- Dhanuka Group reiterated the fact that data is very important. “When I joined Dhanuka, I was looking at ways to add value because we are a very old organization. We have a lot of research data available - customer, factory, plant and IoT data. We had implemented ChatGPT recently; my focus was to increase the productivity of the organization. We integrated our data warehouse with ChatGPT. This is also benefiting people a lot as it was delivering more efficient time to delivery. So, data is a super-power nowadays to play around.”   

In the view of Atul Govil, Chief Transformation Officer & Head (SAP & IT) - India Glycols, data for a corporate, individual or a country per se is a safety net. “It works like a telescope using which you can see what lies in the future. You also prepare for both foreseen and unforeseen events that may happen. Second is, data also brings a compelling argument when you are in a meeting and when you want to drive any action data or harp on out of the many options available. What I finally also see is that data brings a sense of trust, because basis this data you can put forward your decision with respect to any issue.” 

Dr. Sindhu Bhaskar, CEO - EST Group explained that though he is not a data guy but through his enterprise he keeps collecting data and so his views are slightly different from the others. “15 years back I did not have any value and only during these years I have got what is called value. There is this uberization of technology and so we are moving towards numbers and revenues. And this when we talk about data. The determining factor for your importance or value is data. When this data is becoming the real gold or oil in the society, the data scientists and analysts are the real goldsmiths. But the real purpose of this data is to sieve this information, sort it out and create a proper roadmap for the organization.”   

Pankaj Mittal, Founder & CEO- Digizen Consulting opined that everything is data today. “With data coming into the picture, the omni-channel approach to collecting this data, getting analytical outcomes as a toolset, the fact-finding exercise backed up by data analysis is creating new business models. We have seen how multiple companies across different industries are creating new channels.  Metaverse for instance has created new omni-channels, where the experience created in the virtual world delivers the goods in the physical world. Lot of opportunities are arising out of the data. Businesses are creating new revenue channels or economic models out of this data.”

Panel discussion II: 
‘Need for Value Marketing in Unprecedented Economic Times'  

Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu
Editor-in-chief, VARINDIA

Marketing for business is a highly valuable tool as it helps to create brand awareness, drive profit and growth, acquire and retain customers, and enhance engagement. Today, consumers are more price-sensitive than ever before. They look for products and services that offer the best value for their money. This means that businesses need to focus on communicating the value of their offerings in a clear and concise way.
In a tough economic climate with increased competition for a smaller customer pool, brand differentiation and effective communication of value becomes critical for businesses. Our survey among the marketing leaders reveals that 46% of marketing leaders say consumers will simply seek out cheaper alternatives to their usual purchases in a recession.

Ritesh Dhawan  
General Manager, Redington Ltd.

There is absolutely no doubt about the benefit of time saving when it comes to AI. I would like to emphasize that it has changed the way search was being done before and in the erstwhile search format there were a lot of data points that were available and we spent a lot of time making our opinions. So one of the things that ChatGPT has done is it has created a bridge between not having an opinion to having an opinion in a short span of time. It is a really commendable tool for marketers and business people all across. 

Kaustubh Patki
Head India Marketing, OpenText

I have worked in four different companies and the biggest challenge we had every time that our company got acquired and we had to start from ground zero. The key thing was that we had challenges both internally and externally. Internally, there was a new structure, new team and externally with the customers we had to ensure the right visibility, mindshare. So the very key thing was that we had to ensure that we had the right kind of corporate narrative. Today, it is not only about reaching the decision makers but the users also that is where we had to ensure omni-channel presence. While these were happening COVID started where we saw the emergence of automation, hyper personalization, data driven marketing and now that it is in hybrid format.      
 

Anita Kukreja, 
Head - Marketing & Channel Sales- IceWarp India

Over the years what has evolved in the marketing field is you always have the call to the customer and the partner. Ultimately, whatever strategies have come up or whatever you do but everything revolves around the customer and the partner. So yes, there are your strategies that have come up, the journeys, the trust of it is something that works upon but ultimately, the entire journey, process that happens is primarily around these two key factors. We are trying to bring value to the customer that you are interacting with.

Shanker Sareen  
Marketing Lead, India & SAARC, SentinelOne

People in our organization are realizing that things are changing - digital media, social media. The other day, somebody said that we want to do hyper personalization. So, one does not know that the sales representative is just trying to throw a fancy word to impress you or his manager, or is he actually serious about it. Our problem is also to understand that when they expect something from us, are they actually wanting that for their particular segment or a market or are they just trying to get a catchy word from the media and trying to replicate it. So, it is a ballgame where marketers have to be very clear as to what is required.

Nikhil Dudwadkar  
Head of Marketing, Kaspersky

We all have gone through a long marketing journey, so the challenge has been changing in every job for all of us, but over the years what I see is that it is more of accountability that has been increasing. The emphasis for marketers is more of accountability which is primarily generating leads. Now, COVID has changed that because in the last two years we have been really looking for opportunities that sales people can drive. I think our successors will face more challenges as we have grown over the last few years.
 

Panel discussion III: ‘Unifying Digital Agenda'  

Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, Editor-in-chief, VARINDIA
The role of a Chief Digital Officer (CDO) has become increasingly important in recent years, as businesses have become more reliant on technology. The CDO is responsible for driving the organization's digital transformation, which involves using technology to improve business processes, customer experience, and operational efficiency. At the same time, the CISOs are responsible for developing and implementing a cybersecurity strategy that aligns with the organization's overall business goals. This includes identifying and assessing risks, developing security controls, and managing incident response. CISOs must have a deep understanding of these threats and how to mitigate them. They must also be able to work with other members of the executive team to ensure that cybersecurity is a top priority for the organization.

Dr. Karnika Seth
Managing Partner, Seth Associates

Unified digital agenda is a very interesting mix of words but a lot of things will come under this. One, whenever we think of a unified digital agenda it comprises what we see as a trend today and what needs to be looked in for a solution. If we look at cyber security in particular, there you have to see the technology that will be deployed, the emerging trends, we also look at the possible threats and the solutions. So, the agenda should be actually a mix of what we are seeing today, the challenges and what kind of solutions we need and to have the digital readiness for the future as well.    

Saurabh Gupta
Group CDIO, Gujarat Fluorochemicals

Nowadays, we cannot stop the way digital is getting adopted. These days people do not come to IT leaders for any digital tool, they just express their needs, likings and ask for the support to implement a tool. Now, it is the responsibility of the IT leader to ensure the implementation and integration of the tool with the overall ecosystem. So, we have to be very agile in the current era and ensure that we build infrastructure in a way that has APIs available to connect on an open source, cloud platform and to ensure that business runs as per their needs.        

Col. (DR) Inderjeet Singh, Chief Cyber Officer, Vara Technology

We are in an era of AI v/s AI where AI would be the defender and AI tools will be made as malware to attack you. This has started happening. While we talk about a unified digital agenda, we have to change the whole process of the cybersecurity itself. At present we look at cybersecurity from a miniscule perspective, we feel that all the threats are lying outside. It's time to think that threats are inwards and we have to look at the complete network from outside in. That is how you have to change the whole process.    

Bohitesh Misra
Co-founder & CTO, Avexa Systems

We are developing a connected healthcare analytics platform. So, we understand that the kind of risk that we carry is phenomenal. One of the issues that we take care of as part of the development is data privacy and we ensure that data is seamlessly shared among the patients, doctors and the hospitals with the approval of the patients. So that kind of privacy has to be a part of the system. Second is data biases and data poisoning. Whatever recommendations engines that we generate if you start biasing those data at the back end then recommendations would be entirely different. So those kinds of risks are pertinent and it has to be taken care of. 

Dr. Debabrata Nayak
Head of Cyber Security, Ericsson

From the world perspective, Unified digital agenda starts with three letters – A, B and C. A means advanced technology like IoT etc. B means Broadband and C means Cloud computing. These are the digital agendas that people are talking about anywhere across the world. Similarly, in India A means Atmanirbhar Bharat, B is BharatNet and C is come and Make in India which is equivalent to chip making and making self-reliant. When we build this kind of digital analogy it is important that we have to make digital inclusiveness and run our digital services on top of these platforms.           

Rohit Raman
Managing Partner & APAC Head, Etek

The way digitization is taking place in India and if I compare with the level of awareness and education that is prevalent in the Indian diaspora there is a big gap. There is a great dependency on using AI tools to extract business decisions out of highly unstructured and dispersed data. But the way we are using AI for the benefit of business decision making, there is always a group of cyber criminals who are way ahead of us and making use of the same tool to crack the shield that we are using to build AI.

Kumar Ravi, CISO, Teleperformance India

AI is a technology of today and tomorrow. So, from a security point of view AI is being used by the criminals and if the adversaries are using it, I think the defender side also has to use it. The battle of tomorrow or today cannot be fought with the weapons of yesterday. We all know there are security and privacy concerns because it involves a lot of data to be consumed, processed and there are concerns of ethical use of that, biasness, transparency – these are the inherent risks that come with the use of AI.      

A Leader should motivate his team in difficult times

Debasis Satapathy  
GM (HR)- NBCC LTD 

The way Artificial Intelligence is becoming popular like ChatGPT and other AI tools, the US President called a meeting a few days back where Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Google’s Sundar Pichai were also present to discuss the impact of AI in the job market. This is really very alarming for us. In a recent newspaper it is reported that TCS has hired 90% less than what it hired last year. They are all undergoing a position of lowest ever attrition in the organization. So, you can imagine what kind of impact it is going to have.

As an IT Head of an organization when this kind of disruption is happening, how will you deal with your team when they will be demotivated? How will you motivate them? Let us try to understand how Duryodhan beheaved in Mahabharata. When the Mahabharata war was about to start and both Pandavas and Kauravas were facing each other, Duryodhan came down from the chariot and he started addressing to his army to motivate them because they knew that in the just concluded Virat war from Pandava side only Arjuna was there and from the Kaurava side all the worriers like Dronacharya, Bhishma, Kripacharya etc. were there but still Kauravas could not face Arjuna in the Virat war and they had to accept defeat. So just imagine what must be the thinking process of Duryodhan. He was the only person who knew that defeat was a must for them. He could not accept it and he said they are the best in the world and their strength is more than the Pandavas. He encouraged the army to fight together to win it despite knowing that they are going to face the problem.

Allied Telesis provides a single SDN controller to manage and operate an entire solution

Dattatray Katkar  
Head of Business & Strategic Alliances (INDIA & SAARC), Allied Telesis

Everyone is talking about digital transformation, for me it makes life simpler with the help of AI/ML technologies. Since digital transformation is done by applications and applications run by an intelligent network, we are very proud to announce that the satellite launchpad of India has been running successfully for over 10 years on Allied Telesis, where the entire PSLV and SLV is intelligently managed and automated by the company. There are many organizations in each vertical, where Allied Telesis is instrumental for digital transformation of their network and security.

Allied Telesis is a Japanese company, headquartered in Tokyo, we are into an end-to-end SDN driven AI-enabled network and security providers. We started in 1987, a 37 years old organization. Since my company believes in the philosophy of starting everything on its own, starting from R&D, manufacturing etc. Globally we have 1700 employees, almost 700 R&D centers, over 160 patents, and two factories. We offer end-to-end solutions starting from core, access etc. We are the pioneer and one of the largest deployment-based industrial switches companies. We are the industry's AI-enabled wireless controller.

An entire solution will be managed and operated by a single SDN controller. In the current scenario, if you talk about any networking solution you require a minimum of two to three controllers, whereas in Allied Telesis you have just one controller which can take care of routing, switching, wireless, security which is firewall and part of zero trust solution. 

Cyber criminals are using AI tools and technology like never before 

Prof Triveni Singh  
Superintendent of Police, Cyber Crime, 
Uttar Pradesh 

“Since I deal with all types of criminals, I have come to realize that they are very tech-savvy and use different kinds of technologies. One criminal that got captured revealed that they use AI. If they lay their hands on any video of 5-10 seconds duration, they are capable of creating a half an hour-long video using deep-fake application. So where will they get these videos? They will either pick it up from social media or record any live video for one minute and will then create a video which no one will be able to call it fake. They will add any audio over that video. Earlier we used to easily comprehend whether any text is written by a criminal or not since there used to be lot of grammatical errors. But now using AI tools like ChatGPT or Bard, criminals come up with refined texts and no one would be able to make out whether it is genuine or fake. Similar to a boardroom where C-level executives discuss their AI strategy, we in our meetings try to figure out what will be our counter AI strategy. We are in search of such technology that can help us in understanding that. In my observation, cyber criminals are the best marketers. Leave aside IIM or an IIT graduate, a cyber-criminal having studied only till 12th class has the sense for marketing which very few can possess. I once read a book written by Kevin Mitnick, a world-renowned hacker, in which he wrote about the art of deception. This art uses social engineering attacks and the main component there is to put a bait before any human.” 

Nutanix offers solution to manage data sprawl easily  

Vikas Jain   
Team Lead - Systems Engineering, Nutanix   

Today, all organizations are looking to modernize their existing environment. Each and every organization today is looking for transformation in their technology. But it is not easy. There are a lot of restrictions or constraints that prevent people from modernizing their infrastructure in as easy a way as they believe it would be. One major thing is the budget and it constraints organizations from adopting a lot of new environments. 

The second thing is the skills of the people. Today, if you have one technology, there will be people who do not want to change their skill set and they do not want to adopt new technology because they fear that they do not have the skill set and they won't be able to manage it effectively.

Third is the time that is required to modernize the system. They will always look for modernizing some stuff and then accelerating that modernization into a complete data center.  It used to be very easy to make decisions in the past - either on premises or in the cloud. But today, with so many options for everyone there are so many options available to run their infrastructure. So, there are so many avenues and within a few years they end up in such a situation wherein the infrastructure is spread in so many places.  Nutanix uniquely provides the solution wherein we provide you the options of managing your data sprawl easily. The main crux behind managing this kind of environment is having a common operating environment which runs on-prem as well as on edge locations, branch location, or on public cloud also. 

CP Plus bolstering its commitment towards Make in India initiative

O P Kukreti  
Manager, Aditya Infotech

CP Plus is the largest surveillance brand in India. We have 42 offices, over 150 service centers across India and have a reach in more than 450 cities in India. In line with the Make in India initiative, we have come up with the largest factory in Andhra Pradesh. This factory is ISO certified and has a world-class latest SMT division. We also have a world-class product testing lab there. We are doing complete manufacturing in this plant. We can manufacture three million devices per month in this facility and we are going to scale up this capacity upto five million devices per month. So, 99% of the equipment will be manufactured here on a security basis. We have a wide range of product portfolio from consumer cameras to integrated solutions. We offer explosion proof cameras, thermal cameras and according to the requirement you can choose from a wide array of products.

To optimize the things, we are doing around technologies but we think it is our responsibility that people should be aware of the technology and should be able to deploy this. So we are driving a program called Mission Tech wherein we train our SI partners and customers to utilize the technology and devices which will help them to secure their premises. We do these training sessions very frequently. These are available offline and online. We also do awareness programs such as road shows and conferences. We feel it is our responsibility that the country or partners should know how to utilize these devices and how to install or apply them.  

Kaspersky follows a maturity-based cybersecurity approach for solutions 

Piyush Verma  
Partner Account Manager, North India, Kaspersky  

Very often we hear a particular industry getting attacked. Ransomware in today's scenario is very sophisticated and targeted in nature. It is available as a service on the portal. They work as a complete ecosystem. In the traditional scenario, a single person did all the things – developing, negotiation etc. but now they have domain experts. Developers are there who are developing the ransomware on-field negotiator, someone is there in lateral movement, so everything is in place and working as an ecosystem. 

The common challenges with any organization, one is lack of visibility. So when any of the customers is under attack, they have to jump from one window to another. In security it says if you cannot protect something which you cannot see. So, visibility is the main challenge. Second, whatever tools are available in the market they are very complicated in nature to handle. According to a research report the response time of a Managed SOC is somewhere around between 15 to 20 hours. Just imagine you are under an attack and you did nothing for 20 hours. What will happen to the data? Every now and then a new surface is coming up like smartphones, BYOD, concentrators etc. which we have to protect. Last but not least is your users. Awareness of your users is also a challenge.   

We in Kaspersky work on a maturity-based cybersecurity approach. It is based on three key pillars – Equipped, Informed and Reinforced. 

The world of information technology would never stand still    

S Mohini Ratna   
Editor - VARINDIA    

“Computing power has already established its place in the digital era, with almost every device and appliance being computerized. Technology is enabling faster change and progress, causing an acceleration of the rate of change. Artificial intelligence will become more prevalent in 2023 with natural language processing and machine learning advancement. Artificial intelligence can better understand us and perform more complex tasks using this technology. It is estimated that 5G will revolutionize the way we live and work in the future. Like AI and Machine Learning, Robotic Process Automation, or RPA, is another technology that is automating jobs. As more organisations adopted Cloud Computing, they found several limitations in the technology. Edge Computing helps to bypass the latency that Cloud Computing causes and helps organisations to get data into a data center for processing. 

There is always something new on the horizon when it comes to technology. The world of information technology would never stand still. This rapid, ever-changing industry is full of new technologies, tools, software frameworks, and innovative ideas. Artificial intelligence, automation, and other advancements in information technology specifically set the stage for more technological evolution. Talking about VARINDIA and Brand Book’s journey, the products of Kalinga Digital Media, have been serving the Indian ICT industry for the last 24 Years. VARINDIA has been voted as the #1 trusted source for Technology news and insights.” 

Feeding too much of sensitive data into ChatGPT is going to have its ramifications  

Dr. Pavan Duggal 
Expert in Cyberlaw and e-commerce law- Supreme Court of India    

“We are all connected with data. A lot of new developments are taking place in the area of data. Many of us are using ChatGPT nowadays. So, the next time ChatGPT gives you data and you put that as your own, what kind of ramifications could that have for you? A certain company wanted to get some sales programs and proposals and tasked the sales team to do so. The sales team uploaded the complete corporate data on to ChatGPT, got the stuff back and cut and pasted it back into the company's account. Little did they realize that they were actually giving so much of corporate data out there, and which is bound to create its own legal issues and challenges. So, in this context, when I talked about data protection, I mean a different ballgame altogether. Around 12,000 SBI employees’ sensitive personal data has been leaked on telegram channels and it still is available. It's not normal data but sensitive personal data. Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently announced that the Indian data protection law is now going to be a great leaping step forward because it's going to help increase India's reputation globally. The monsoon session is coming in and the new Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) bill 2023 is listed to be passed. This particular bill has got a distinctive journey. In the last five to six years, we have been deliberating various options and drafts of this bill, and now we have reached at a reasonable level of maturity and how we ought to go forward. The final draft of the digital PDP bill 2023 is still not out in the public domain. So,it's hard to really comment on the exact parameters of this bill till such time the exact draft is going to be out.”  

Microsoft Surface taking the hybrid work to next level

Rahul Dutta  
Country Head, Microsoft Surface

Why is Microsoft investing too much into productivity? Because we believe that the way that the future of work has been designed is going to change. We have surveyed about 20,000 people in 11 countries, and there is a report called Work Health Index, it actually tells you about how organizations and work cultures are changing across the board. So, the first insight that we really talked about is productivity paranoia. For example, 87% of the IT workers today believe that they are working more than ever. But only 12% of the managers feel that hybrid work is truly productive. That is the disbalance that we are talking about. The reason for that is the way that we have applied the hybrid work. It is more than just the HR policy change. There is a reason for that and look at the state of our conference rooms today, there is a table in the middle, a projector on one wall, a white border and about 15 devices are there to do one meeting. But still people who have joined remotely, cannot truly collaborate. They cannot do a live whiteboarding with people who are in the room. And that is where the hybrid work collaboration and inclusiveness, the two things which are very important for hybrid work, challenge the whole concept or notion of hybrid work. We have a couple of solutions to address this. We have a product called Microsoft Surface Hub which is basically a smartboard that comes integrated with a camera, speakers, and a digital whiteboard that can work from two sides.  

With extensive multi cloud capabilities, Crayon helps customers optimize their cloud spend  

Venkataraman D   
Exec. Dir. - Sales & Strategy, Crayon Software Experts    

“Crayon is a Norwegian headquartered company and we have built our organization with the core values of integrity, quality, pace and agility. Customer focus is our theme and we ensure that we always deliver on time as committed to customers. Agility is super important for us. We continuously innovate and ensure that we excel in whatever we do and we do it with continuous excellence. At a glance, we have 20 years of expertise in software and cloud advisory across the globe. We have 7000 certifications across different technologies and the solutions that we bring to the table. We also cater to 80% of the global market through 50 offices in different countries.  

We have strong relationships and strategic partnerships with technology provider leaders as well as cloud partners. We serve close to 70,000 customers of various industries, starting from SMBs to enterprise. We are listed in the Norway stock exchange. We are ‘People First’ organization and we believe in our employees. We are committed to provide them a diverse, equitable, as well as an inclusive workplace. The understanding of customer needs is of paramount importance to us and we ensure that we modernize IT infrastructure to the cloud. We are cloud agnostic. The decision of which cloud to choose is again depends on the customer requirements. We have a very strong, extensive multi cloud capabilities to help them to optimize their cloud spend. Through our continuous engagement and value addition, we normally get into customers’ long term commitments.” 

Fire-Side Chat Rameesh Kailasam, CEO, Indiatech.org with Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu

Tax simplicity is the need of the hour

The Fire-Side chat session, on the topic, Policy - A Maker and breaker of innovation, Entrepreneurship in Tech start-ups, saw Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, Editor-in-chief, VARINDIA and Rameesh Kailasam, CEO- Indiatech.org discussing on the role that policy plays in fostering and limiting innovation and entrepreneurship in tech start-ups.  
GST was meant to simplify tax structures. We have moved from sales tax regime to VAT regime and then subsequently to GST. It was supposed to be one nation, one tax. Although we have very simplified slabs, the same product can sit in multiple slabs depending on how you look at it. If you buy food and movie tickets in a theatre, the tax is 5% but if you buy as a combo it is 18%. We have similar examples like if you buy a non AC bus ticket online then it is 5% but if you stand in the queue and buy a ticket there is no GST. There are a lot of such peculiar combinations that exist and the challenge that we are facing is while the government and all the departments are working hard to promote ease of doing business along with the states. I think we have successfully managed to achieve ease of setting up business but in ease of doing business unless we bring back tax simplicity we cannot fully achieve the vision of the government. In case of GST, we need to seriously re-look at removing the same product setting in multiple variants.
If you look at the list of items and the way it is categorized I think it is somewhere not meeting the goals for which it was set up, to simplify the whole system. At the same time, it is a great reform. There is nothing wrong with the thought of GST and the direction of it. But what is probably that we need to fix quickly is this multiple interpretations and various angles that are coming in. For example, startups are having a lot of issues where you have three or four people landing at your doorstep and saying I am the consuming state when actually it should have been simplest as to who was the consuming state. So, we are having issues where people are getting show cause notices etc. It is not easy to convince for the simple reason that there is nothing clear which is there to defend some of these. The fundamental thing in law is that it should be so clear that you should not be going to courts on both sides and unfortunately we are beginning to see that trend which is not a healthy sign.

Product Display