The COVID-19 pandemic is undoubtedly the most defining moment of the 21st century so far. Last 7 months, this pandemic has created havoc to the global economy too.
With countries going into the lockdown n businesses have suffered. Yet, this phase of pain and difficulty has also been a period of innovation and transformation.
In very short time, companies have learned and adopted to the new business model which understands technology as a medium of change. It has enable industries to do work from home (WFH) to moving enterprise-grade applications to the cloud, enterprises have been embracing technologies like never before.
There has been quite a few initiatives, most recent one by CNBC-TV18 and INTEL, put together a virtual technology leadership summit under the Banner of “Future-proof your Business” with the theme “Digitization to Accelerate Disruption”. An event gathers huge participation from Industry leaders, who shared insights on how their organizations not only coped with the pandemic, but also remain primed for growth. It has boasted a complete spectrum of engagements for the knowledge-seeker with multiple panel discussions, keynotes, fireside chats, a resource center laden with white papers and reports on technological innovations.
Prakash Mallaya, VP & MD – Sales, Marketing & Communications Group, Intel India, in his keynote “Digitally Transformed India” underscored the digital shift that is current shaping up around the landscape. More major trends shaping up cloudification of everything, diversified ecosystem, large pool of talent that can be tapped digitally, and localized infrastructure.
There has been several discussions Carried out with key important to “FUTURE PROOFING”. With large pool of industry leaders, discussion made how embracing disruption can be the key to tide the crisis. With an assortment of instances of how their respective organizations have used the power of the cloud or artificial intelligence (AI), the industry leaders spoke at length on how technology could be a business administrator.
Certainly, with embrace presence of industry leaders, wide range of technologies being discussed, Neeta Verma stated how mobile governance could be the next big thing, while Vijay Seth listed the benefits of data driven manufacturing. Deep Aggarwal talked of how conversational AI is making a difference to the banking sector. Lisa A Spelman hinted at the broader trend of technology adoption referring to a recent survey of over 2000 IT decision-makers globally, of which 65% stated that pandemic has helped them increase their investments in their digital transformation.
Cloud computing has become the backbone for the transformation that is sweeping across the industry. Yet, with the ubiquity of cloud, there are still few issues that are of concern to the companies, namely security and privacy.
To address these challenges and more, a session on “cloudification of everything” was one of the highlights of the event. Panelists for this discussion were Sridhar Reddy, Founder MD, Ctrls; Harmeen Mehta, Global CIO, Bhakti Airtel; Satish Chandra Doreswamy, VP & Global Head- cloud infrastructure services, TCS; Sumit Malhotra, CIO & Cloud Evangelist and Kit Ho Chee, VP Sales, Marketing and Communications Group, Intel Corp. . The discussion centered around. How cloud has become pervasive and brought immense advantages with in the enterprise space. Focus has been made to create well- defined cloud strategy that maps with the business objective, thereby helping to adapt to the right business model. Harmeet Mehta spoke about potential of edge computing and how 5G WILL BE LIKE A “steroid injection” for cloud adoption. Looking into the crystal ball, Kit Ho Chee stated AI and ML would be the most exciting applications on cloud in the days to come.
Healthcare is another sector that has been profoundly impacted by the pandemic. Being on the frontline of the battle against COVID-19, the healthcare industry had to adopt and adapt in a very short time. A session at the Tech Leadership Summit focussed on the challenges that were faced by the sector and how it overcame them. The panelists for this discussion were; Prakash Malaya, VP & MD – sales, Marketing and Communications Group, Intel India; Meenu Ganesh, MD and CEO, Porter Healthcare and Dileep Mangsuli, CTO, Wipro-GE Healthcare. The fireside chat took up pertinent points related to the industry, Meenu Ganesh spoke about the new technologies that are making an impact in the healthcare sector, technologies like AI, genomics and robotics. Prakash Malaya addressed the most critical concerns associated with digitization, namely security and privacy of data, sharing insights on how the same had been resolved.
There were discussions at the Summit, like a start-up panel, that brought together new-age entrepreneurs like Raghav Chandra, Co-Founder & CTO, Urban Company; Greg Moran, co-Founder & CEO, Zoomcar and Advil Shetty, CEO, Bankbazaar.com. In this session, the entrepreneurs shared their take on how technology has let them respond to customer requirements in a much efficient manner.
Submit’s another highlight, special address by Puneet Chandon, President – India & South Asia, Amazon Internet Services Pvt. Ltd., who spoke about how SMEs in India were embracing technology and leveraging it to build exciting products and solutions. He also shed light on the 15 year collaboration between Intel and AWS, which led to several path breaking solutions in the space of High Performance Computing (HPC), Big Data, ML, IoT, and so on.
All in all, the Virtual Tech Leadership Summit was a resounding success with active participation displayed from across the industry. In a way, the Summit was an excellent example of how real world actions are successfully translating into virtual ones.
