Meet the panelists for TechBizz India
Topic: What's really driving your ICT environment?
Date: August 7, 2013 (Wed)
Time: 9am to 12pm
(Lunch included)Venue: Four Seasons Hotel
The ZDNet TechBizz panel series wraps up in India on August 7, focusing on how to manage an increasingly complex ICT environment to drive innovation and cost efficiencies.
Hear from five senior IT decision makers and thought leaders in Mumbai, as they share how they handle challenges such as those related to the latest four-letter buzzword SMAC--social, mobile, analytics, and cloud.
Register now to make sure you don't miss out on our largest panel event of the year. You can also catch the event online as it will be streamed live on our TechBizz page, as with the recently concluded Australia and Singapore sessions.
You can also pose questions for the panelists via Twitter, using the hashtag #zdtechbizz.
Venkatesh Babu S, Cafe Coffee Day
Venkatesh is head of management information systems (MIS) at one of India's fastest growing coffee chains. With over 18 years of experience in technology, reporting and business analytics, his expertise covers implementation of ERP (enterprise resource planning), point of sales, and business intelligence.
Cafe Coffee Day outlets and cafes number more than 2,000, supported by over 8,000 staff--expanding at a rate of around 20 outlets per month. To scale up with the fast pace of growth, the company has adopted software-as-a-service for areas such as point of sales.
Besides the challenge of managing security and control of IT systems across multiple locations, he is in the midst of forming strategies for BYOD (bring-your-own-device) and big data.
Manish Bahl, Forrester
Manish is vice president and country manager for Forrester in India, serving CIOs and business technology leaders.
He focuses on the role of technology as an enabler of business outcomes. He provides strategic guidance and advice to clients in the areas of emerging technologies, architecture and technology strategy, IT investment, business technology alignment, innovation, and technology trends and their impact on competitive advantage.
His research focuses on helping clients mature from an IT-centric role in their organizations to a business-embedded one. Manish shares some of his analyses through his company blog.
Yagnesh Parikh, ICICI Securities
Yagnesh is CTO for the securities arm of the ICICI group, which includes one of India's largest banks. Main applications he has to support include mobile trading, account opening and tracking system, the core trading platform, CRM (customer relationship management), and corporate ERP applications.
He has been responsible for several IT projects including building the brokerage platform which caters to the 2.6 million customers of ICICIdirect.com. The company currently has about 3,800 employees and Yagnesh is currently working on strategies for big data and BYOD.
He leverages his IT knowledge with keen interest in financial and broking sectors. Prior to joining the ICICI group in 1994, he worked in another big four rival State Bank of India for 13 years.
Raghupathi C.N., Infosys
The head of the India business unit is responsible for strategy formulation, sales, delivery, innovation and total P&L (profit and loss) management in his area.
The Infosys vice president is also the chair of various BIS working groups working on establishment of ICT standards in the power sector. Raghu is also part of the Rakesh Mohan committee on Transport Policy where he is personally leading the portion on "IT in the transport sector". Separately, he holds a U.S. patent for his work on ICT.
Prior to this role Raghu worked extensively in the U.S. and has worked with clients like Southern California Edison, and British Petroleum. He has over 27 years of experience in utilities, chemical plants and ICT.
Mihir Karkare, Social Wavelength
Mihir co-founded the company in 2009, which he now counts as India's leading social media agency.
The company's vice president, and designated "IT guy", has been an early adopter of social media technologies with a particular interest in how they are changing Big Business, or mega business deals. He comes from a background of developing enterprise-grade tools for the Web, desktop, and mobile platforms.
Social Wavelength now operates across four cities in India. The fast growing SMB has over 150 employees and expects to double this headcount within three years.
The rapid pace of growth has put the company at an IT crossroads. As a startup, it had jumped on the cloud bandwagon for capex cost savings, but is re-evaluating the cost effectiveness as fees for additional licenses start to diminish the returns.