The event was kicked off with an address by the Head of SJMSOM, Prof Karuna Jain. She spoke about technology and analytics being the two key tools of a consultant. The keynote address was delivered by Mr Neelesh Hundekari, Principal AT Kearney who said that the current scenario is not all doom and gloom because what some may perceive as frightening, others may perceive as challenging. The next talk on the agenda was by Mr Santosh Kamat, Director, KPMG, who spoke about issues and challenges in Public Private Partnership in the infrastructure sector. Next in line was Mr KG Purushottam, Associate Director, Protiviti Consulting who stressed on the need to work within a risk management framework. He also emphasized the fact that there are more expectations from consultants to deliver more asolutiona from more service and at the same time demonstrate value and savings.
Mr Ashish Dwivedi, an alumnus of SJMSOM who is a part of Corporate Strategy and Business development at the Aditya Birla Group, shared his knowledge at the event. He highlighted the typical reactions of corporates at the downturn period and the key concerns of the corporate sector at this point in time. Mr Sanjay Kulkarni, MD, Stern Stewart & Co. gave an optimistic view of the downturn situation saying that we were lucky to sense it very early.
The late-afternoon talk was given by Mr Govind Balan, Principal, Diamond Management and Technology Consultants who spoke about the impact of regulatory changes on Mobile Telephony. The last talk of the day was delivered by Mr. Prashant Gupta, Partner, McKinsey and Co. who spoke about the implications of the global crisis on India. The vote of thanks was delivered by Prof Dinesh Sharma, the Faculty Coordinator for the Consulting Continuum.
The Systems Continuum was held on 15 March, 2009 on the theme aIT-Driving the next generation Business processesa and was attended by executives of companies like Infosys, Yahoo, eBay, CA, Capgemini Consulting, IBM, MphasiS, Reliance Communications and Directi.
The event started with an inaugural speech by Prof DB Phatak, Chair professor KReSIT, IIT Bombay. This was followed by a key note address by Mr S Gopalakrishnan, CEO & MD, Infosys Technologies Ltd who spoke about aThe Future of ITa. He spoke about the impact of IT saying that only 25 pc of the actual potential of IT has been explored till date. Dr Jawahar Malhotra, CTO of Yahoo! India shared his insights ona Leveraging the open Weba. He spoke about the Yahoo! Open strategy and beginning of the YOS momentum.
There was also a panel discussion on aManaging IT in the downturna moderated by Mr Rajdeep Sahrawat, the VP of Nasscom. The panelists were Ms Sunanda Ambardar Chak, Director, Marketing, CA; Mr Meetul Patel, VP, Capgemini Consulting; Mr Bhalchandra Joshi, VP, Reliance Communications and Dr Jawahar Malhotra, CTO of Yahoo! India.
The post lunch session started with a talk by Mr Suvojit Mazumdar, Global Delivery Leader, Global AIS, IBM India on aSmart solutionsa wherein he stresses that in order to build a smarter planet we need to provide solutions in fields of digital data, distributed computing, and IT infrastructure. The next talk was given by Mr PA Krishnan, President, ITO & Head, GDS – New Business Support, MphasiS on the concept of aProductivity and agility comes in Greena.
Mr B Muralikrishnan, Director, Category & Product Management, eBay India gave insights to e-commerce opportunities. The last talk of the day was by Mr Naresh Jain, Quality and Community Evangelist, Directi. He conducted an interactive session on Agile Software Development.