The 12th edition of Express Technology Senate opened to a full house in Kuala Lumpur. Top Indian CIOs gathered to deliberate on the theme of the forum, ‘Finding value and success through SMAC’.
Interestingly, this is the first time ever at this event that two special reports were also released, one of them being, ‘SMAC: The paradigm shift’, prepared by KPMG.
Expressing concern over security that is increasingly under threat due to the astronomical amounts of information being shared across social media sites, Subramanian N, Technical Director – Management Consulting, KPMG India, said, “The amount of data that is being shared on social media sites increases the concern about security manifold and needs to be dealt with at the earliest.”
In his keynote address Subramanian stressed that India is looking forward to enabling smart health and smart agriculture. Also, with the allocations made in this year’s budget, the task has just got a new momentum.
The government of Odisha also launched an IT Handbook, highlighting the achievements of the state government over the last couple of years and the state’s potential to emerge as the next biggest investment destination of IT and ITeS companies.
Aditya Mohapatra, Head, IT Promotion Cell & Secretary, Department of IT, Government of Odisha said, “Major players like TCS, and Infosys have development centres in the state. We have come a long way from building IT towers to IT parks, and now to IT investment reserves for the growth of IT in the state.”
Representatives from various IT solutions provider companies, including NxtGen Datacenters, Fortinet and Concur Technologies discussed how IT has evolved over the past few years and the changes the CIOs need to adapt to.
Satish Vishwanathan, VP, NxtGen Datacenter & Cloud Technologies commented on how 15 years back data centers were built for merely desktop access but thanks to SMAC it is now becoming a user centric environment.
Navin Mehra, Regional Manager-West, Fortinet said, “Despite putting all the firewalls in place, enterprises always need to be vigilant about the human error that will let data breaches to slip in. Though BYOD acceptance has grown over the years, but it brings with it new challenges.”
Canon sponsored Express Intelligence Awards were announced following a power panel discussion on ‘2015: Outlook to Efficient Enterprises’.
The panel discussion on the topic ‘Going Social: Building a Customer Centric Enterprise’ provided insights into how the enterprises are leveraging social media to engage and interact with customers.