Ingram Micro Tech Forum 2016: Thrive and lead in the tech disruption

Technological advancements are causing such huge disruptions across enterprises today that even the traditionally best run businesses are falling apart. In contrast, some of the new age internet businesses are quickly rising to fame and turning into million dollar companies. How fast and effectively businesses can embrace new technologies is becoming a competitive differentiator.

Disruptive technologies like virtualization, cloud, analytics are powering businesses to stay in sync with customer demands and grow, while throwing up fresh challenges. To help enterprises find relevant answers to these questions, Ingram Micro, one of the leading IT distributors in the country, in partnership with Dataquest, conducted the Ingram Micro Tech Forum 2016 at the Chancery Pavilion, Bengaluru, on 20th September. The event took a holistic view on how technology is redefining today’s businesses and what should be the technology roadmap for success in this digital era with insightful sessions on digital transformation, virtualization, analytics, hyper-converged storage and so on.

The inaugural session by Sanjay Achawal, Executive Director, Ingram Micro, gave an overview on how the company is transitioning towards being an end-to-end technology player with competencies across areas like mobility and cloud. “Realizing new business demands, we have started a cloud division. It is a one stop shop for all your requirements of cloud services,” he said.

The session by Cecil Godwin Rajsingh Charles, focused on digital disruption and what should be the strategy to stay ahead. He talked about the impact of technology innovations like driverless cars and face recognition technologies on today’s businesses. How can new age and traditional enterprises win the disruption and stay competitive was the focal point of discussion. He also shared insights into HPE’s offerings in the digital space and how the company endeavours to accelerate digital transformation for enterprises.

The Virtual IT, real enterprise session by Suresh Kini, VMware, emphasised on how businesses are moving to virtualization and software-defined networking, and also threw light on VMware’s complete stack of products to cater to software-defined business needs.

With the big data explosion, every other enterprise is facing demand for robust Data centers. On these lines, the session Passive IT, Active infrastructure by Santosh Kulkarni, Country manager, business development Smart Solutions, Emerson, delved into the need for effective data centers to support growing enterprise demands and also tried to answer some of the common questions like – How can the data center be cost effective? How can I scale up or down as per changing demands? He also shared some key details on how Emerson SmartRow solution can resolve these challenges.

Additionally, the panel discussion, Defining the technology roadmap for smart Indian enterprise discussed some of the major challenges in digital transformation. One of the panelists, S.Gopalswamy, Category manager, HPE Servers, said, “There is a complete change in how businesses are run today. You cannot achieve business transformation without IT transformation.” Anoop Nair, Regional Manager, System Engineering, Vmware, emphasized on how software –defined will be the future norm and how Vmware can support the transition.

No discussion on disruptive technologies is complete without the mention of analytics. The Q&A session with IBM’s Rakesh Meher, National Brand Manager, Content analytics, on delivering cognitive business made this up with valuable insights on the importance of analytics in turning data into insights. Vaidyanathan. R. Iyer, Business unit executive, IBM security systems also talked about the role of analytics in security.

The Q&A session with Ramesh Narsimhan, Specialty presales head, Dell EMC, discussed the uptake in flash storage among Indian enterprises and cleared the common misconceptions around it. He also spoke about the Dell-EMC roadmap for the next one year and how the combined entity plans to serve its customers more effectively.

The Panel discussion secure, analyze, prosper – the formula for growth talked about how the right security and analytics framework can set the roadmap for future business growth.
The event concluded with some more interesting discussions, including Q&A on Smart Business with Zebra Technologies and sessions from Nimble on bridging the app-data gap, Axis Communications on making the shift to IP solutions and Ingram Micro Cloud Blue Services on E-waste management.