ASIRT hosts Techday focused on driving business opportunities

ASIRT has hosted a high octane Techday for February, which was dominated with exciting business opportunities by not one or two but three sponsors. Showcasing the best in product and services, data storage major Seagate, networking major Arista Networks and Kaltech – an integrated digital infrastructure provider, introduced some of their latest innovations for ASIRT Members. The event also witnessed a high spirited celebration of the successful first ASIRT Cricket Premier League – (ACPL) event which saw enthusiastic participation and bonding among ASIRT Member Consortiums.

The evening began with a detailed presentation by Mayuresh Bhagwat, Channel Account Manager, Arista Networks – an international Data Centre Networking company and a pioneer in Cognitive Cloud Networking technology who recently acquired Mojo Networks. From humble beginnings of networking switches, Arista’s networking infrastructure today hosts over 50% of the global internet traffic. Arista currently caters to esteemed clients like Google, Netflix, Microsoft, Facebook besides Alibaba. Bhagwat further announced the expansion of Arista from Data Centre Networking to Enterprise-Grade 400G Switches, due to happen by the end of March 2019. Highlighting Arista’s key feature, its Extensible Operating System - EOS, Bhagwat elaborated the unique operational model for Arista switches. From USP’s like SSD enabled monitoring that ensures zero downtime, seamless operations, non-dependability and the option of ‘live patching’ in the event of a reboot. Further, with widespread compatibility features, Arista offers Members and SI’s one of the fastest ‘go to market’ advantage when dealing with multiple networking challenges.

Mayuresh Bhagwat says, “Arista has been a highly focussed brand, particular about the quality of its products, above all else. The comfort and user-friendliness of our direct customers - the IT professionals, is also another focus area that has defined our product innovations. This ideology has helped us grow into a 2 billion dollars revenue company within a span of 10 years! With our entry into the enterprise segment, we aim at recreating the same success. We do not like to be number 2! With ASIRT, I have had the privilege to interact since my days with Mojo and it had been a great experience with good ROI and thus, when I transitioned to Arista, it made logical sense for us to bring our enterprise solutions to the ASIRT platform.”

The evening progressed to the second presentation of the day by Vivek Upman, Enterprise Lead - India & SAARC, Seagate Technology. As global data & storage leaders, Upman began the presentation tracing the 40 years of journey of Seagate, from manufacturing 5 MB disk to the latest 16TB hard drives. As a leader with one of the widest product portfolios, comprising of HDD’s &SSD’s, Seagate currently handles over 60% of enterprise business worldwide. Further, elaborating the industry trends driving the growth of both SSD’s and HDD’s across the consumer and enterprise spectrum, Upman introduced the latest innovations at Seagate, which are tailor-made to address the dynamic demand. These included products designed with HAMR, MACH.2 and DuraWrite technologies , which are specifically innovated keeping three key differentiators in mind for the enterprise business, namely throughput performance, workload capacity and data security.

Vivek Upman said, “This is our first interaction and experience of ASIRT as a platform, which offers a rare and elite mixture of SI’s and IT Retailers that are genuine and extremely well connected and knowledgeable about the industry trends and developments. It is thus an honour for us at Seagate, to speak to such an audience. Having said this, I would also like to elaborate that while media and entertainment and high-performance computing are driving the growth for us, a 100% of our sales, in the enterprise division is driven through channel partners, similar to the ASIRT Members present here. Given this significance, we had two broad goals when participating here in ASIRT. First was to leverage this opportunity to inform and educate the SI community about our technology and R&D that is the driving force at Seagate, highlighting our commitment to long term technology development. The second was to showcase our latest innovation, the NYTRO Enterprise SSD’s, with the hope of commercial collaboration in the coming quarters, where we can expect the support of the SI community. It has been a delightful experience presenting and interacting here and we look forward to coming back again!”

Next on the agenda was a presentation by Krupashankar Chaube, CEO, Director of Kaltech Digital, a leading integrated digital infrastructure provider. Speaking about the new age technology developments in the Single Board Computers, Chaube introduced ‘MobiComp’ brand Computers, a unique innovation based on ‘System on Chip’- SoC architecture. Highlighting the transformation in technology over the decades, MobiComp is a first of its kind innovation leveraging the gen-next SoC architecture, with processor, RAM, Graphic Chipset, Storage, WiFi and Bluetooth, VGA, LAN & USB ports all embedded on a single motherboard. This further makes the product 38% more efficient than the conventional Desktop, while also making it highly compact. Further, Chaube elaborated the extended versions of the MobiComp PCs, highlighting the strength, durability, and efficiency of the product.

Post the extensive sponsor presentation, the evening took on a lighter flavor, with a session acknowledging the success of the recently concluded first ASIRT Cricket Premier League (ACPL) Tournament which was powered by Redington as Main Sponsor. HP, Seagate, Netgear, NPAV, Artis, Miracle Tech & Chip Com chipped in as Co-Sponsors for this family extravaganza. The five Teams had Icons, Infobahn, Ant My ERP, Web Werks & Pioneer as Team Owners from among the ASIRT Members. Amidst the renewed bonding and merriment, the organizing committee for ACPL – Tushar Shah, Hiten Shah, Sanjay Ruparel & Manish Kapasi, invited the Captains of the winning Icons and runner-up WebWerks teams, to share their experience of the event and recommendations for the future events. Murtaza Bharmal, Captain of the Icons team, elaborated that the event helped him and fellow members to not just get active and participate in outdoor activities but also created an opportunity for bonding. From 6 weeks of training before the event to the consequent rise in consortiums’ participation, the event was a win-win for all. Further, players winning the ‘Man of the Match’, etc. were also honoured and acknowledged. Later all the Members present went into frenzy when the Video of ACPL highlights was screened bringing back the high-pitched as well as tender moments. The friendly banter continued off the podium and spilled over a high spirited networking dinner, bringing the high octane event to a delightful end.