100 CIOs received awards, others found inspiration at Big CIO Show & Awards
Trescon’s seventh edition of Big CIO Show & Awards, which was recently organised in Mumbai, witnessed a great success with presence of more than 150 Chief Information Officers (CIOs) and IT leaders from across key industry verticals.
The two-day global event for CIOs, which successfully assembled some of the brightest thought leaders in the IT industry, kicked off with a welcome address by Mohammed Saleem, CEO of Trescon; and the opening keynote address was presented by Chairwoman Danielle Di-Masi, winner of 2016 Stevie Award for ‘Most Innovative Communications Professional of the Year’.
Presence of more than 35 speakers from various industries was the special attraction of the Trescon’s show. The event created a nice platform to discuss the trends in the industry, emerging challenges and their technological solutions. The speakers emphasised on the need for a concise and structured framework that needs to be adopted by companies in order to excel in their technological initiatives. It also put forward why it is the best time to adopt technologies of the future that fall under IR 4.0 (Industrial Revolution 4.0).
Embracing transformation
With the ever-changing situation today, every sphere of business is witnessing rapid transformation, coping with the changes has stood as a major challenge for the CIOs at all kinds of industries. While addressing this issue, Dr. Satyam Priyadarshy, Chief Data Scientist at Halliburton, and Trescon’s very own Advisory Board Member, explained, “There are four important pillars for transforming industries. Data analytics forms the foundation, leveraging to new technology is the second pillar, making technology real-time is the third and eventually, building self-autonomous systems in industries form the fourth pillar.”
Beyond the framework
With passage of time, the role of a conventional CIO has been much more complex and evolved into something else altogether. Today, more than just designing data structures and devices, a CIO needs to know how the changes will impact the industry and what benefits the investment will provide. Many CIOs are now being incorporated into the governing board of directors in their organisations too. Thus, today every CIO needs to deliver relentlessly towards the business success of his or her organisation. Quite naturally, in their personal lives, many of them are often highly stressed and become the victim of fatigue.
Considering the gravity of the situation, Trescon included some venting sessions in their programme. Nikhil Desai, a motivational speaker who has showed up on TV and radio in India, USA, Philippines, South Africa and Oman discussing stress management, delivered a motivational talk in the event. Also, the show included an hour-long yoga session by Isha Foundation, an initiative of the Yogi Sadhguru.
Challenges of women CIOs
Female leadership is an ever-growing trend in the Indian IT industry. However, how far the Indian industry has been able to accommodate the woman leadership is still a debatable subject. Under such backdrop, Trescon made a bold effort to accommodate a discussion on the challenges and advantages of the women leaders in the Indian IT industry.
One of the stand out sessions of the show was an all-woman panel discussion that brought together top women IT experts discussing ‘Woman CIOs in the IT industry’, where the panel was elegantly moderated by Danielle Di-Masi. Other panelists included Vipin Luthra, Associate Director, PepsiCo; Ritu Madbhavi, CIO, FCB Ulka Advertising; Vineeta Singh, Co-founder, FAB BAG and Anuprita Daga, CISO, Reliance Capital Ltd. The panel highlighted the various issues like cultural and gender biases affecting the female leadership in the IT sector.
Emerging technologies
Fierce competition in the market and ever-growing need for data management are paving the way for some emerging areas – where every progressive company today need to put utmost attention. Although the definition of Big Data varies from organisation to organisation and leader to leader, but in reality today each and every company is facing the burden of managing their data. But in almost all cases right kind of data structuring and analysis leads to the best business result.
Trescon’s event included two special workshops respectively by Avaya and DigitalOcean to brainstorm the CIOs on the latest technologies to manage customer engagement and use cloud technology. In Avaya’s workshop on ‘reinventing the customer experience strategy’, participants saw numerous insights on how to reinvent a customer experience strategy. Similarly, Digital Ocean exposed the attendees with the effective ways of managing data on the cloud.
Solutions demonstrated
Some of the technology providers who presented their solutions at the show included Aryaka, DigitalOcean, Avaya, Ameyo, Algorisys Technologies, Zendesk, Thales e-Security, WinMagic Data Security, Tufin, Team Computers, Embee, Locuz Enterprise Solutions Ltd, Symphony Summit IT Solutions Pvt Ltd, WebWerks Data Centres, Finesse IT Labs Private Limited, Just Dispose, AGL Digital and Flock.
Concluding remarks and declaration from the organiser
While speaking on the successful completion of the seventh edition of Big CIO Show & Awards, Mohammed Saleem, CEO, Trescon said, “CIOs accept the change like no other C-level Executives. The IT innovation has been re-examining itself all the time since the PCs were invented in the 1950s, each time bringing another innovation to test. We are glad to note that every year hundreds of CIOs attend the Big CIO Show & Awards to be a part of conversations that can change the way they do their business. I congratulate all the winners of Big CIO 100 Awards.” He concluded by saying, “To commemorate their achievement, Trescon will additionally give Big CIO 100 Award winners a free access to any of our three ticketed International or Indian events in 2018.”
A few words from attendees
K T Prasad, Sales Director, Zendesk India, said, “The quality of delegates were superior in the event and we could feel that from the kind of questions and conversations we had. It definitely has helped us reduce our sales cycle because we got an opportunity to talk to wider audience while giving a view on what kind of company we are or what innovations we are bringing. The other advantage is when we had a parallel conversation during the lunch or networking break, it really enabled us to fast track sales process. We believe an event like this will cut down our sales cycle by months.”
Maitreya Parikh, Senior Manager – Territory Sales – BFSI (India), Thales e-Security, said, “The prequalification process and a dedicated event for CIOs are two of the catchy things for us. Having done business with Trescon in the past using their pre-qualification process, we have proven statistics of leads conversion – and thus it is a sound investment to do in an event with Trescon. The Big CIO Show & Awards too is not an exception.”