CHENNAI : Big names in the country’s IT sector prophesied the emergence of new technology and business infrastructure on the back of cloud and edge computing in the coming days, at the SPICON held in the City on Saturday. Around 150 delegates took part in this conference and discussed best industry practices when it comes to agility, automation and cloudification.
“There will be a re-engineering of applications to use full potential of cloud,” said L N Rajaram, chairman of KirtiLabs, while addressing delegates at the conference organised by the Chennai chapter of Software Systems Process Improvement Network (SPIN). Rajaram Venkatraman, CEO of Veltech Technology Business Incubator and president of SPIN Chennai, who delivered the theme address, attributed USA software giant Sunguard’s failure to not moving onto cloud computing.
“Nobody expected such a big company to declare bankruptcy but they had to pay the price of not updating themselves,” Venkatraman said. He also stressed on the importance of the automation wave and claimed that automation of processes has moved from an ‘opportunistic’ cost-cutting measure to a systematic approach most companies are aggressively pursuing. “India can become the automation capital of the world,” he said, explaining how India should take advantage of the fact that it is a young country.
Pradeep Shillige, executive vice president and global head of digital systems and technology for Cognizant, also reiterated how the big companies are prone to failure by continuing their traditional business models.“Since 2015, around 50 percent of the Fortune 500 companies have had to declare bankruptcy or merge with other companies,” Shillige, explained the extent of the situation.
He however, said there is a resurgence of traditional companies of late and that they are hitting back at ‘digital native’ challengers. “This will cause a huge disruption in the tech environment,” Shillige said.
Sangita Agarwal, the CIO of Accenture India, who also spoke at the conference and explained how technology has enabled businesses to challenge other businesses in a completely different sector. “Ola and Uber are challenging Walmart with their app and business processes,” she said.
Dave Norton, executive director, Consortium for IT Software Quality, and Bill Curtis, the founder of CISQ, addressed the audience via Skype. The event also had panel discussions about automation and cloudification.