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The Silicon Valley of India, Bengaluru witnessed a host of CEOs from corporates, Small and medium Enterprises (SME), IT associations and VARs from the ICT sector coming together to witness the 6th edition of Southern India Information Technology Fair (SIITF) 2015. Organized by VARINDIA, the event was themed around ‘Digitization opening up opportunities for SMBs’. The event was designed to discuss and showcase excellence in technology innovations and entrepreneurship, while being a unique platform for the SME and VARs to understand the scope of digitization that will open up big opportunities for them in due course of time.

The event commenced with the lighting of the ceremonial lamp in the presence of Shri M. N. Vidyashankar, President, India Electronics & Semiconductor Association (IESA), who graced the occasion as the Chief Guest. Besides, the other eminent guests present at the event included Mr. Satyen Vyas, CEO - Symphony Summit; Mr. A L Jagannath, Director Marketing, India and SAARC- VMware; Mr. Sandeep Nagpal, Director-Marketing- SAP INDIA; Mr. Ravi Kanakarajan, Head of Commercial & EBG Sales – South- Lenovo India; Mr. B S Rao, VP – Marketing - CTRLS Data Centers Ltd.; Mr. H T Suresh, Regional Chief- HUDCO India; Mr. Suresh Subramaniam, Enterprise head- Inspira Enterprises India; Mr. Prakash, President- AIT; Mr. Karthikeyan, President-SIITA; Mr. Soumit Bhattacharya, Head Services - Inflow Technologies; Mr Nalin Patel, Vice-President, SIITA; Mr Karthikeyan, President - SIITA.

Lauding the role of SMEs in driving the IT scenario in the country, Mr Deepak Kumar Sahu, CMD & Publisher, Kalinga Digital Media, said in his address of how 2015 will be a remarkable period for both large enterprises and SMEs. “Going by the trends in technologies in 2015, statistics show that adoption of IoT will rise, particularly in the SMB market and larger organizations that were not early adopters. Industry consolidation is a key driver for wider IoT adoption, combined with more rigour on IoT cybersecurity – which will decrease Machine-to-Machine complexity. These developments will drive user’s confidence and lead to new business models, better outcomes and RoI that is more clearly defined and understood.”

While the Chief Guest for the evening, Shri Vidyashankar enlightened the audience on the scope of manufacturing and opportunities for the entrepreneurs in the coming days, the audience had the opportunity to listen to Shri Syam Madanapalli, Architect and Innovator of IOT, who spoke on how IOT will be the next wave of growth in the Industry.

From the corporates, Lenovo, LG, Canon, vCentric, Tally and Inspira actively participated in the discussions by showcasing their technology areas and discussing market strategies.

The event also took the opportunity to felicitate the Channel community from the Southern region in different categories. The resellers, distributors, VADs and system integrators recognized were Systech Services Ltd, N J DataPrint Pvt. Ltd, Inspira Technologies, Value Point Systems, Future Businesstech India, Redington India and JITSMEA.

Besides this, VARINDIA also recognized HUDCO LIMITED this year for Affordable Smart and Resilient City Initiatives. The event ended on a good note and drove home the message that Digitization is indeed the big thing. While the dawn of digitization is anticipated in the country, SIITF tried to gear up its advent by throwing light on the opportunities that it would bring to everyone, particularly to SMBs.

The Panel discussion of the evening was moderated by Mr Deepak Kumar Sahu, Chief Editor - VARINDIA, and deliberated on issues like how SMEs are empowering a change in India, the biggest challenges they face and how they can leverage the SMAC wave. The panelists included Mr B S Rao, VP – Marketing, CtrlS Data Centers Ltd.; Mr Satyen Vyas, CEO - Symphony Summit; Mr Subramanian S, DGM- Telecom, POWERGRID; Mr Nalin Patel, Vice-President - SIITA; Mr Karthikeyan, President - SIITA and Mr Prakash, President – AIT.

Mr. B S Rao hinted on the fact that the SME can play a very significant role. “The entrepreneurial eco-system is driving the wave currently in India and now is the era of start-ups where employment is getting generated in a large amount. Out of the 300 million entrepreneurs globally, around 45 million are in India alone. So this is good news for us.”

Mr Satyen Vyas also echoed a similar statement. “Smaller companies being the real generation of job opportunities and with technology being the backbone for not only large enterprises but also mid-sized and smaller companies, I think this is the right time for SMEs to play the rightful role in making the Indian economy grow.” Mr. Subramanian S threw light on how PowerGrid is helping SMEs grow “We are having a power transmission network of about more than 1 and a half kilometers across the country. We have laid the optical fibre cable on these power lines and are providing an entirely different route for reliable telecom and data connectivity for the enterprise segment. We are also having an MPLS network; in a way we are supporting the small industry in a big way. Powergrid is one of the implementing agencies for providing the national knowledge network and through these links we are also providing support of Internet services, data services for the businesses of SMEs, most importantly in remote locations too.”

Mr. Nalin Patel also agreed that the SME sector is going to have a very good future. “With the Make in India campaign started by the PM, it’s necessary that people will have to grab the opportunity.” Mr. Karthikeyan chose to speak from a channel perspective. “If we see there are around 5000 partners in South India alone, of which only 10% are VARs. There is a huge opportunity indeed to empower them. We see opportunities that are humongous for these people to go on encash and thus take the business to the next level where it is going to help everybody in the chain. Also with digitization coming in, there are going to come in more opportunities.”

Telling from his experiences in the automation sector, Mr Prakash commended that automation is a key factor for any SMEs to become successful. “We have to adopt automation – it can be anything like starting to use a computer and integrating it with other elements. We are now talking of IoT which is a part of automation at home level. With minimum efforts, SMEs have to get the maximum output from the industry by associating oneself with automation.”

Mr. Aravind KS, Associate VP – Business Development, Tally Solutions
“Digitization to me is related to computers, which talks about devices, big data and Internet. Opportunities is one thing I heard 10 years back at the South India Regional Conference that spelt the idea that India has been developing in the last 200 years and it is going to see much more development in the next 20 years. I am already witnessing changes in many ways. 10 years back, I used to take photo copies of my travel tickets but today everything happens on my phone, right from booking a ticket, paying for it to getting the boarding pass. Because of digitization or technology, we have lost the ability to sit in front of my customer on an upward pedestal of knowledge and engage with him to sell our services. Because the buyer knows more than the seller today, it will become very difficult to upgrade your business if you do not take care of these small things.”

Mr. Sanee Chaurasia, Business Manager (South) – Channel Sales IMS, Canon India
“Every sector like Hospitality, BFSI, Insurance, will have confidential data which they need to store it in the record room. It has been observed that 90% of business information is kept on document, which means that they are very critical. In the banking sector, the document workflow would include new account document, Teller Dept. Document, Transit Dept. Document, Loan Collection Documents, Audits and Cheques. In a span of just 5-6 years, this bunch will multiply as new files keep on creating and adding to it. This is exactly the scenario in other sectors as well. Migration to a Digitized environment will solve this issue of rise in siloes of data. Canon has a large offering of document scanners that help our customers in transferring their data from a physical to a digitized environment.”

Mr. Ravi Kanakarajan, Head of Commercial & EBG Sales – South, Lenovo
“The world is changing and having understood this, even we are changing with times. The erstwhile PC market at the world wide level is just 65 million units. Today if you look at the PC+ connected devices, tablets alone are 40 million units and smartphones are 350 million units per quarter. We have a long way to catch up and we consider Samsung or Apple as our competitor. We have at present offerings in the categories of smartphone, PC and tablet. The products we have launched in the last couple of quarters fall in the category of smart connected devices. Partners will benefit in a big way as you will have an end-to-end solution to offer to your customers. We are looking at building a $5 billion business in enterprise and we are partnering with some of the large players in the industry like Microsoft and VMware.”

Mr. Samardeep, Marketing Manager – IT Products, LG
“We have observed that PC penetration has been stagnant at 10% and the last 2-3 years vendors have given up hope of revival of this PC industry. But we at LG have kept the hopes alive by bringing in innovations around our products. From the start of 2015, we have seen a month on month growth happening in this space. With the current government policies rolled out, we finally see the stage set for the country to bag the 10 % PC penetration benchmark. It will double in the short run with major demand going to come from government and the SMEs. Earlier it was very tough for LG to deal with SMEs because they always had this constant price thing in mind. But with new entrepreneurs coming up, there has been a demand for innovative products. We on our part are working on customized, power saving and smart displays that come in various form factors and give you the flexibility to work smart.”

Shri Syam Madanapalli, Architect and Innovator of IOT
“Whatever we do, we should try to make this world a better place to live in by enhancing the lives of every human being. In this process, we are going to advance our civilization. Every activity that we do has an effect on our civilization. So how do we advance civilization? Sometime in 1911, Sir Alfred North White stated that civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. For instance, in the Stone Age people would have gone on hunting to find food for them. But today we find our food prepared and made ready on the table. This means that our civilization has advanced. Similarly IoT is going to have a great effect on this world and advance this civilization further. If Time would not have got invented, there would have been no planning of what to do at what time. It would have become difficult for this civilization to advance without time.”

Mr. Subin, Regional Sales Manager – vCentric Technologies Pvt Ltd.
“vCentric has been there in the market for the last 10 years and has served more than 100 customers. Today we have some 650 + consultants in functional as well as technical area. In 2009, we had come up with industry solutions. Some of the service we offer for SME that include end to end implementation, roll outs, upgrades, HANA implementation & migration, SAP FIORI & Personas implementations, besides others. Our focus verticals are automotive components, manufacturing, Textiles (where we have done 5+ implementations), process engineering and so on. Today we enjoy the gold partner status and is a preferred partner. Our revenue at present comes from SAP. SAP has undertaken 15 business transformation studies and has been published and vCentric has emerged as the top partner for that."