Infotech Forum 2018, a much awaited annual event of VARINDIA held on 25th May 2018 at Shangri La witnessed the presence of 400 high-profile guests comprising of CXOs (CIO/CTO/CISO), government officials, PSUs, enterprises and IT consultants from various verticals, who gathered under one roofto understand on the topic: ‘Disruption – A new Reality’.
The forum provided a platform for all to discuss the latest technological disruptions that are taking place in the Information Technology industry through technical presentations and also business networking.
S.N Tripathi, Secretary, Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs- Govt. Of India and Mrutyunjay Mahapatra, DMD, Digital Business and New Business – State Bank of India graced the Infotech Forumas special guests.The other eminent dignitaries who’s presence raised the bar of the event include Shankar Aggarwal, OSD- ASSOCHAM; Vishal Dhupar, Managing Director, South Asia- NVIDIA; Pawan Duggal, Cyber Expert-Supreme Court of India; Dr. Herald Dcosta, Director- Intelligent Quotient Security; Bharat B Anand, CIO- NETGRID; Suresh Kumar, Partner & CIO, Grant Thornton, Dr. Rajeev Papneja, COO- ESDS Software Solutions; Nirvan Biswas, CTO- NHBC; Ricky Bindra, Group Sr. VP-JIO; Harpreet Singh, Territory Manager- Kaspersky Lab; Subroto Panda, CIO, Anand and Anand and Damodar Sahu, Partner & Industry Advisor- WIPRO.
The event commenced with the welcome speech given by Deepak Sahu, Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, Kalinga Digital Media. In his speech he threw light on the digitization and the scope that digitization brings to people. “Digitization is creating tremendous opportunities for economies across the globe, and India is an example of a country that not only understands this opportunity, but it has embraced it. As a media house, our focus has been Technology, that is at the forefront of everything we do.”
Vishal Dhupar, Managing Director, South Asia- NVIDIA in his speech highlighted the opportunities of AI and hinted that firms across the globe are fast becoming aware of the power of Artificial Intelligence, Mixed reality, Deep learning and Blockchain technology. While Shankar Aggarwal, OSD-ASSOCHAM shared his perspective on the economic growth and sustainability, S. N Tripathi, IAS, Secretary-Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs- Govt. Of India shared his perspective on Digital India and the scope that e-governance offers to every citizen.
Mrutyunjay Mahapatra, DMD – Digital Business & New Business – SBI in his keynote address, enlightened the audience on how banks always want to understand their customers better and improve their relationships. “Technology could cut banks’ infrastructure costs by up to $20 billion each year by 2022,” he said.
The previous data protection laws were put in place during the 1990s and haven’t been able to keep pace with the levels of technological change. On this background, Pawan Duggal, Cyber expert-Supreme court of India spoke on how GDPR will bring the biggest change in data protection laws in more than 20 years.
Dr. Rajeev Papneja, EVP & COO, ESDS Software Solution spoke on the innovative solutions the company offers in its state-of-the-art data centers.
In the evening session, Dr. Herald Dcosta, Director- Intelligent Quotient Security spoke on India’s present security landscape.
The event also witnessed the recognition of 100 Eminent CIOs of India, India’s Top 25 Trusted Brands along with the Top 50 Most Admired ICT Brands. This was followed by the recognition of the Top 10 Brands Icons of India.
INDUSTRY SPEAKERS
Vishal Dhupar
Managing Director, South Asia- NVIDIA
“The industry is in a very interesting phase that is transformative. We talk about AI all the time and yet it has been in existence pretty much from the time computer science has made its advent. We all know from the facts that human mind works in 2 mode- Reasoning and Understanding and every AI specialists have put their efforts behind reasoning and not behind understanding. There could be many reasons why nobody has put any efforts behind understanding, but there are two main which stand out- one that you have no clue how to handle understanding and second, there is very low computation power to manage understanding in machines.When we talk about AI in simpler words, it is that algorithm which the world calls as deep learning running on super computers.”
Shankar Aggarwal
OSD- ASSOCHAM
“We are supposed to be the world leader in IT and if we don’t take advantage of IT and harness the latest advances in disruptive technologies such as AI, Blockchain, IoT for the betterment of every common man, we will miss the opportunity. We have got the capability, and capacity. Today the society is inspirational and we are a hugely aspiring society; so let’s take advantage of this. And let’s try to find out what these technologies can do especially in four core areas as per my mind – the first is the quality of education, next is the health sector, third is in the area of safety &security of every individual, and the last area is financial services.”
S.N Tripathi
Secretary, Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs- Govt. Of India
“Technology can disrupt your peace and tranquillity. It’s a big convenience one can understand, but convenience at a cost. I am one of those who believe that digital has lots of possibility but digital also has to have the responsibility in-built. Today in environment of AI, IT, IoT, deep learning and all those kind things we have no choice but to learn these things and maybe learn as fast as possible. We missed revolution1 because we were colonised at that time, we missed revolution no.2 because we had no resources at that time but we cannot afford to miss 4.0 industrial revolution because we have the capability. AI and digital technologies can make us producers of goods and services of the world. Those days are not far.”
Mrutyunjay Mahapatra
DMD – Digital Business & New Business – SBI
“Fintech is almost a synonym of .com. Everybody believes that the venture bug has come and anyone can make money in this world. What we are observing in Fintech is that many of them are engaged in the so called valuation and not the value creation game. This is the first problem. Now, Fintechs do not have the ability to scale up when it comes to experimenting a concept with a database of 100 or 200, the software works very well but at deployment it fails because the proper sandbox ecosystem In India is not available. So a reliable sandbox is not there.Now Fintechs are there from a two month old start up to very large companies. There are four to five areas where 90% of the Fintechs are working – lending, payment, risk management and data analytics.”
Harpreet Singh
Territory Manager- Kaspersky Lab
“When we talk about security, all the business verticals these days like hospitality, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, manufacturing etc. are under continuous threat. Hackers are keeping a close watch on all of us every moment. Everybody is under scanner. There has to be a proactive approach in mitigating all these kind of targeted attacks like IoT, Cloud, BYOD are the ones that are driving the market. There has to be a proactive kind of approach from the C level community when it comes to the overall cyber security landscape.90% of the threats are very generic in nature and can be controlled by technologies like anti-virus, firewalls etc. But the rest 9% are the sophisticated ones. One cannot counter these risks by simple technologies.”
Pawan Duggal
Cyber Expert-Supreme Court of India
“May 25th is a historic day as the general data protection law has been implemented in the European Union. Typically when a country passes a law it is applicable within its territorial boundaries. We in India have the Information Technology Act which applies to entire India but unlike other laws it also applies to people outside India – a person of any nationality in the world cannot violate or contravene the provisions of the act. We did this law 17-18 years back but GDPR has only replicated what we have done in our law. It says that you will have to primarily ensure that the data of European citizens or people residing in Europe are adequately protected. Typically this is for European Union, however a clause in the law says it is also going to apply to any company, data controller, data processor located outside the union who is dealing, handling or processing the personal data of residence of the European Union.”
Dr. Rajeev Papneja
EVP & COO, ESDS Software Solution
“Innovations and disruptions are not always like the iPhone which has completely changed the way the world used to work. Such kind of innovations may happen once in a decade. Innovations are also some small important changes to what already exists. It is not always necessary that we try to innovate something at the expense.We all know what public cloud gave us. When the research firms say that the public cloud is going to grow by some percentage, by how much is it of the total IT landscape is what we need to know. Everything will not go into public cloud. Private cloud will stay. There is data that needs to reside on your data center. There is also need for edge computing.”
Dr. Herald Dcosta
Director- Intelligent Quotient Security
“As far as the cybercrimes are concerned, the digital evidence is bought either by the complainant or by the accused. But the digital evidence can create a lot of problem. From the digital evidence point of view, the problem that arises is whom to believe and whom not to.When you talk about WhatsApp, messages are altered, modified, deleted and then we do not have any type of a server where we can get this information from. So when you ask for information from WhatsApp, it being a virtual server by nature shall reply us saying that they cannot provide you the information. Therefore, no data is retained at our end. Then it becomes a very questionable task as how to get these particular messages to be authenticated.”
The 7th edition of the Brand Book on the Indian ICT Industry launched at the 16th IT FORUM 2018 in the presence of (from left to right) S Mohini Ratna, Editor – VARINDIA; Deepak Sahu, Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, Kalinga Digital Media; Ricky Bindra, Group Sr. VP-JIO Bharat B Anand, CIO- NATGRID; Vishal Dhupar, Managing Director, South Asia- NVIDIA; S.N Tripathi, Secretary, Ministry of Parliamentary Affairs- Govt. Of India; Mrutyunjay Mahapatra, DMD, Digital Business and New Business – State Bank of India; Dr. Herald Dcosta, Director- Intelligent Quotient Security; Ajay Kaul, Director & GM – Head Government Business, Dell EMC; Chetan Hingu, Country Category Head – Workstations, Virtualisation, RPOS -HP India; Damodar Sahu, Partner & Industry Advisor- WIPRO and Manish Gaur, Head, IT- Patanjali.
GLIMPSES FROM THE EVENT
