(From L-to-R): Denis Thomas, Director - Banking & capital market- Capegemini; Advocate Prashant Mali, Expert in Cyber Security in India; Kersi Tavadia, CIO - Bombay Stock Exchange; Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, President & CEO- VARINDIA; B R Nath, CTO - Edelweiss; Shankar Jadhav, MD - BSE Investments Ltd;  Piyush Somani, Founder & CMD - ESDS Software; Jayant Goradia, CEO - Savex Technologies; Om Kumar Singh, Chairman - Global TekQ; Parimal Merchant, Director - Global FMB Program, S. P. Jain School and Bhavesh Mehta, Chief Technology Officer - Acuutech

15th March, Mumbai: Innovation in the technology industry was on display and more than 150 Tech professionals, VARs and vendors exhibited at the 10th edition of Western India Information Technology Fair (WIITF) at Hotel Taj Lands Ends, Mumbai. WIITF 2019 was a unique event where partners, CIOs and vendors conglomerated under one platform to showcase their innovation and expertise. The event witnessed high-profile delegates discuss and debate on various issues related to business, security and the future of Hyper Converged Infrastructure/back-up.

We are in an era of accelerating complexity in design and engineering challenges. To combat this changing landscape, and with the increasing presence of E-commerce   companies in the country, it is time for VARS and partners to work more closely so that businesses could turn into greater supply chain collaboration. 80% of the partners in this industry say that active and meaningful engagement with tech vendors is essential for the success and they are bullish on the newer Technologies to scale-up their business. As new technologies emerge, marketers will continue to reach out to new consumers through these new medium.

The focus of this year’s WIITF event was “Ease Of Doing Business”. To complement the event, there were vendors that included ACUUTECH which is into HCI & data back-up; Dell EMC which is into end-to end technology solutions; Savex Technologies which is into Technology distribution space; ESDS which is a Software leader in managed cloud datacenters in India and Innefu, which is an Information Security R&D start-up, providing cutting edge Information Security & Data Analytics solutions. The event offered a 360 degree advantage for the solution partners to scale-up their business.

Kiran Giri 
Pre-sales lead for MDC Solutions – Commercial business, Dell EMC 
 

“Our dependency on technology has become so much today that there are times the only person we do not connect to is probably our own self. And that is how technology is impacting, transforming and changing our lives nowadays. We have lost sight of the average human span as a result of this technology. Everything you ask me today I can ‘Google’ it or find it on the net easily. This has taken down our attention span from 12 seconds to 8 and we no longer depend on our knowledge. Dell EMC has been a part of the digital transformation journey; this is evident from the fact that the kind of conversations that we used to have in 2010 is so much different from the conversations we are having now.”

Prashant Kumar  
 Business manager, Savex Technologies 
 

“Savex was established in 1986 and this is our 33rd years of our operations and in this journey we can proudly say that we are the third largest ICT distributor in India. This has been possible only because we constantly transformed ourselves to the needs of the market. We do telecom and IT products. Our last year revenue was 11, 500+ cr. We have created a big national network for ourselves and are located today in 33 towns pan India. We have huge warehouses in all these towns; and through these towns we are catering to channel partners in about 650 cities. We have our partners in corners of North-East and cater to the market of Srinagar. I can proudly say that we have close to 40 partners even in a market like Srinagar. So that is the level of penetration and reach we have achieved for ourselves.”

Jayant Goradia
CEO, Savex Technologies 
 

“We have engaged with a lot of vendors and brought on board many products and technologies. One such vendor is Huawei, for whom we have initiated its entire security portfolio and gradually we have increased our business size there. We successfully demonstrated the value that Savex can provide on the table to partners and the customers. We have also recently signed up for a vendor called INFINIDAT, a storage organization founded in 2011 and based out of Israel. They are setting up their presence in India with the help of the Savex team. Then we have just signed up Acuutech for its turnkey and modular IT platform - Acuutech MESH. It has been specifically designed to meet the business needs of small to mid-market organizations and builds on Acuutech’s extensive partnerships with Microsoft and various hardware vendors.” 

Philip Moss 
Chief Product Officer- Acuutech  

“The power of software is defined to empower IT platforms. If we go back to 2003, we used to build systems purely on storage, networking and compute and run our applications on physical hardware. Move to 2008, we saw the birth of virtualization, when we moved our applications on virtual machines which gave us scalability and flexibility. Move further to 2012, we see the birth of the cloud and datacenters, when we started taking advantage of software to build infrastructure solutions. We stopped using monolithic storage, networking and compute and started using services via software. Talking about today, in 2019, the world is talking about hybrid. We embrace the world with internal on-premises systems and integrate that seamlessly with cloud-based systems to deliver advanced infrastructure IT platforms that meet the needs of our business and customers. So today’s buzzword is software-defined datacenter.”

Kersi Tavadia 
 CIO - BSE India  
 

“In the IT industry, you can get carried away by what everybody is doing or talking about rather than what I want to do. A lot of new technologies will keep on coming every day; you need to jump into it just because it is available. You need to assess whether you need it or not or whether it is of any benefit to you and your organization. The technology that has been working for you for last couple of years may still work for you, maybe little less efficiently. So I think IT guys need to think in these tangents before taking up any such projects. And that is when IT will be giving value to the business. Today the time is changing and IT leaders are given added responsibility to take business decisions.” 

Prof. Parimal Merchant
Director - Global FMB Program, S. P. Jain School

“We all understand that technology has been evolving. Amazon has been doing eCommerce for last 20-25 years and the concept of robotics has been there since the 60’s. It is not that these things have come up yesterday. But it is true that in today’s time the discussions revolving around these topics have increased and people have been increasingly talking about these technologies at forums and seminars. But there is nothing to fear for small and mid-level businesses. The only thing that they have to do is transition themselves and take advantage of it. This is where our people suffer a lot because of the kind of fear that has started generating. Technology is not going to break down businesses, rather it is going to help them do those things which would not have been possible a few years back.”    

Advocate Prashant Mali
Expert in Cyber Security in India

“If you look at my LinkedIn post today, I hacvve been talking about what countries are facing with a game called PUBG. For last four years I have been demanding to have an online gaming regulator. The games that have been positioned in the Indian market for Indian kids is not culturally or in any ways evaluated. These games have been immediately given in the market which kids have been playing and as a result there are so many psychological and physical problems that kids are facing. So my concern is - if a game like cricket, Kabaddi, football has a regulator or even online gambling gets regulated, then why not online gaming. My second point is people keep on saying that there are very less skill force in cyber security. But I feel that if somebody is saying this then he is very new to this field because security is an upgraded version of what you are learning in colleges and not a field in itself.” 

Nilesh Mistry 
National Head Channel & Alliance - ESDS Software 

“ESDS has been a strong 13+ year old company into datacenters and cloud services and our presence has been expanding across five continents. We have a robust plan in place to go across 16 new countries that are there. We are fueling our growth with the partner eco-system. The complete team strength that we have is about 650 employees, of which 400 of them are from the technical teams at our India datacenters. The total client base that we have is 40,000+, of which 80+ are Govt. accounts, 300+ are BFSI clients, the ecommerce space we have 50+ clients and so on. So we have a mix of customers covering the entire spectrum and this is what our channel partners are catering to in today’s market. The ESDS Channel Partner Program that we have formulated for 2019 is called ‘Circle of Trust’.”

The event witnessed high-profile delegates discuss and debate on various issues related to business, security and the future of Hyper Converged Infrastructure/back-up 

PANEL DISCUSSION: “Powering The Digital Economy”
 

Shankar Jadav, MD - BSE Investments Ltd.; Purshottam Purswani, CTO - ATOS India; Denis Thomas, Director – Banking & capital market- Capegemini; B R Nath, CTO - Edelweiss; Meheriar Patel, Group CIO - Jeena & company and Lakshmana Vadaga, GM & Head IT - Adlabs Entertainments

The theme of the Panel Discussion was “Powering The Digital Economy” and the session invited experts to discuss on the topic. The panelists were Shankar Jadav, MD - BSE Investments Ltd.; Purshottam Purswani, CTO - ATOS India; Denis Thomas, Director - Banking & capital market- Capegemini;  B R Nath, CTO - Edelweiss; Meheriar Patel, Group CIO - Jeena & company and Lakshmana Vadaga, GM & Head IT - Adlabs Entertainments, and the session was moderated by Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, President & CEO -VARINDIA.

The focus of the discussion was more into security, which is the forefront in everyone’s mind these days. The security services market in India is to witness a $1 billion in 2019, an increase of 13 per cent in comparison to 2018. Organizations continue to feel the pressure to find the right people with the right skills to grow their security teams, particularly given the 24/7 nature of security operations functions.

The panel also felt that to power the Digital economy, there is an ongoing shortage of skills that are driving demand for security services, particularly security outsourcing, managed security services and security consulting. CIOs and CISOs are under increasing pressure to ensure their organizations do not become victims of external attackers, while simultaneously maintaining compliance with regulations.

The discussion also deliberated on how to compete in the era of digital economy. The panel felt that banks can’t compete with Fintech’s if they do not digitize the digital economies in the current climate of cyber-crime still outpacing cyber-security sophistication.

Lastly, the discussion talked about the use of digital technologies in changing the business models, and driving revenue and value versus digitization - conversion of data to digital formats.

This year’s event attracted an enviable roster of delegates from across the country. The key-note address was presented by Kersi Tavadia, CIO - BSE India; Prof. Parimal Merchant, Director - Global FMB Program at S. P. Jain School and Advocate Prashant Mali, Expert in Cyber Security in India. There were other prominent speakers from India and overseas including Philip Moss, Chief Product Officer- ACUUTECH; Piyush Somani, Founder & CMD - ESDS Software; Kiran Giri - Pre-sales lead for MDC Solutions – Commercial business - DELL EMC; Jayant Goradia, CEO - Savex Technologies and Bhavesh Mehta, Chief Technology Officer, Acuutech, an industry pioneer from UK with strong edge over HCI and back-up portfolio to his credit.

The event was supported by various IT Associations including FAIITA, TAIT, ISODA, ASIRT and TEKQ Global.

Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, President & CEO-VARINDIA welcomed the guests and in his welcome note he addressed, “VARINDIA’s commitment has always been partner focused and is continuing its vision to serve the Partners like a platform. Digital transformation is creating tremendous opportunities for the VAR community too and at the same time they are also facing disruptions from E-commerce   companies including Flipkart, Walmart, and now Udaan, Moglix and a few others who had entered earlier in the B2C segment and now have become active in the B2B segment too.

Today’s business climate carries a great deal of uncertainty for companies of all sizes and industries. Unpredictable demand makes it difficult to focus on long-term planning. Instead, companies are looking for more short-term and shifting their investments only into their most compelling projects.”

 Dr. Sahu further also spoke on how today's modern workloads demand modern data protection that legacy solutions often aren't able to provide. “We are entering a new world in which data may be more important than software and people who are really serious about software, should make their own hardware,” Dr. Sahu spoke.

There were 7 Partners from Western India who received the coveted awards of the IT industry, who were adjudged for their hard work and commitment towards the ICT industry.

The awards are were given away by Kersi Tavadia, CIO - Bombay Stock Exchange; Champak Raj Gurjar, President - FAIITA; Bhavesh Mehta, Group CTO- Acuutech and Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, President & CEO- VARINDIA.

The winners were - Bluecom Infotech Pvt Ltd., who received the award for Best VAR, Western India; M Tech Solutions India Pvt. Ltd. for Best VAD, Western India; VDA Infosolutions Pvt. Ltd. for Best Solution Partner, Western India; Pentagon System and Services Pvt. Ltd. for Best System Integrator, Western India; Essen Vision Software Pvt. Ltd. for Best Information Security Partner, Western India; Shivami Cloud Services Pvt. Ltd. for Best Cloud Solution Partner, Western India; and Business Connect Ad Networks for Best Cyber Security Partner, Western India.

There was also a lucky draw session which was sponsored by the house of ESDS Software, and three lucky winners walked away with goodies.

It was an event where the People present had a chance to share their experiences. Overall the event proved to be an interesting day.

Strategies and best practices of CIOs

Venkata Satish G
Director-Security – Rediff.com

“Earlier CISOs had many challenges and it was very difficult for them to get any budget to take up any kind of programs to run. But now with the advent of cyber security and the cyber crimes that are happening, CISOs are playing a very big role in protecting all the data and the infrastructure from cyber criminals. So it is becoming important for all banks to have a CISO who should report directly to the Board.

We have got a lot of cyber security programs lined up. We are working towards getting an ISO 27001 certified and that is the roadmap we are having at Rediff.com.”

Deepak Kalambkar
IT Head & CISO - Marvel Data Services LLP

“The CIO role is definitely changing because they are going into business level to understand it and developing apps and using technology to grow business. In traditional ways, CIOs were only looking after IT infrastructure. But now it has totally changed. In our organization we are doing more meetings with our business partners on how to grow business with new technologies. Considering their views, we are developing new apps and by this we are observing that the business is growing.

In 2019 we have already started developing new apps like creating a dashboard for business partners which will give them a clear view of their business. We are also putting the applications on web so that they can check it on their mobile when they are not in office.”
 

B R Nath
CTO - Edelweiss

“Today innovation is like air. You cannot live or breathe without air, which is effectively 100% of the work that CIOs have to do at the digital transformation stage. And that is how the companies will be able to do business, progress, and survive. Just imagine one simple thing – how has the complete buying and requirement of day-to-day things changed by ecommerce giants like Amazon and Flipkart. So we will have to understand that digital transformation is all about giving customers the delight and experience. This is one aspect that is going to change the business and that is the key thing. And the most important part of this delivery always lies with the CIOs and CTOs. So unless we are able to understand the requirements and look at the convenience that digital transformation will bring in, we will not able to succeed and survive in the business.”   
 

Kersi Tavadia
CIO - Bombay Stock Exchange

“The role of a CIO is very critical today for running any kind of business enterprise. They are more of thought leaders today and they are responsible for defining the business strategies. They sit next to the CEO or business heads or other stakeholders and give very strong inputs in defining business strategies. So they are playing a leading role as far as business is concerned. They are no longer only problem solvers but solution providers. So they are looked upon in a different role as of today.

In 2019 we are looking to increasing our participation in other products of investments. From a technology perspective, we are going to evolve more in open source and focus more into the security aspects.”
 

Sitesh Srivastava
Group CIO - Alankit Technologies

“The digital business is the life for any enterprise or organization. All digital businesses are flowing from one country to another. Apart from that, the way social media is growing, like online selling on Amazon, Flipkart etc., business has gone from manual to digital platform. As far as our organization is concerned, we are into financial, e-governance, insurance and healthcare sector. In terms of e-governance, we are the largest. Earlier it was manual, but now we have taken steps to conduct business through digitization and digital transformation.

CIOs are getting to play a great role for the transformation of the organizations. There are many organizations where people are still not very comfortable with the computer systems and so they are afraid of adopting a new technology. But a CIO will make it easy for adopting any technology.”

Prashant Bokli
Head IT- Being Human Clothing

“Previously the role of CIOs was limited to Information Technology. But now the role has been drastically changed because now CIOs have to work with CHOs, CMOs and other heads of the organization. Now, in any industry, Information Technology has a very big role to play, just because of digital transformation and newly emerging technologies. So every organization today requires new initiatives in IT and so the CIOs are being taken more seriously now.

We want to digitally transform our organization in terms of our on-premise solutions under cloud. Moreover as we are in the retail industry, we are thinking of going in E-commerce   more.”