Bangalore: With different technologies coming to CIOs desk at break-neck speed, the role of CIOs become more imperative not only to adapt to changing pace and dynamics of technology but also to control IT budgets. To bring together these CIOs on a single platform SiliconIndia organized CIO Strategy Summit on April 27, 2012 at Mumbai. This summit was an excellent platform for CIOs to exchange information on current topics, as well as, interact with a variety of industry vendors.
The event kick started with a Keynote Session on “Solving Tomorrow's Problem Today”, which was addressed by Manoj Agarwal, Sr VP, CIO & Head IT of SBI General Insurance.
Forging Stronger Business-IT Relationships
The IT organization's relevance depends on its ability to leverage understanding of current business needs and future direction – and then deliver technology solutions and services with greater impact. Such key points were discussed by the panelists, Meenakshi Agrawal, VP IT, Mumbai International Airport, Prasad Dhumal, Sr Director IT, DHL Express, Joydeep Dutta, CTO, ICICI Securities, Ashish Mathur, CIO, WNS Global Services. Subramaniam V, Director - IT & CIO of Otis Elevator moderated this panel. Meenakshi was of the thought that relationships and relationship building are keys to aligning IT with business. Organizationally, it is good to put in place a structure to drive synergies with business, so there are IT people who are SPOCs for each area of business, this helps to bring in domain based “best practices” as well as offering users a single point of contact for all their IT needs.
Gaurav Mohan, VP Channels & Head of Mumbai Region, Huawei, gave an interesting perspective for the topic “Enterprise Mobility, Collaboration & Cloud: A New Horizon. Monetizing Platform as a Service and Implementation Models was addressed by Sachin Sancheti, Principal Architect – Windows Azure, Aditi Technologies. He said, ‘To sustain the growth of value add and due to disruptive events “Innovation is not a choice, anymore”. CIOs are thinking more of Innovations than just keeping the lights on. Cloud platforms specifically PaaS (Platform as a Service) Microsoft Windows Azure enables the innovation characteristics.’
Alexander Zarovsky, Chief of International Business Development, InfoWatch, threw some light on the topic, ‘Innovative DLP, GRC & SMM Solutions for Indian Enterprises’. Next session was carried out by Pranav Bhayani, Technical Support Manager of Kaspersky Lab - South Asiaon a topic, “Be Ready for What's Next: Security for Virtualization”.
The Business Impact of IT Consumerization, Mobility and the Cloud.
The summit moved towards its next panel on -The Business Impact of IT Consumerization, Mobility and the Cloud. This panel discussion came with a broad message that a trio of mega-trends in mobility, social and cloud computing are converging on the IT/business landscape today, as discussed by the panelists Suresh A Shan, Head - Business IT Solutions, Mahindra & Mahindra FS and Gaurav Mohan, VP Channels & Head of Mumbai Region, Huawei. Suresh said that the panelists discussed about the cultural values, which was part of mobile and cloud where the demand was very high and we do constantly use the availability to address such requirements, where such jargons going to be more beneficial if the terms and the localized demands are read clearly and approach towards the required target achieve it and try to explore the ROI in terms of effective and efficient usage of such options which matters a lot to the organization, and the customer.
The CIO Summit was a forum for senior level IT executives to engage in clear and focused dialogue with their peers and examine their management objectives in a relaxed and vibrant environment. The conversations between CIOs helped to validate CIO related issues in different manners. The best part of the summit was that it was a focused meeting for the CIOs and all of the discussions and topics were of interest and relevant. This event was sponsored by Huawei, Aditi Technologies, Infowatch and Kaspersky.
