GST, IOT was the Key discussion point at the 7th SIITF

(From L to R): Mr. Murali Krishnan, CEO – NJ Dataprint; Mr Vishal Dhupar, MD South Asia – NVIDIA; Mr Kuldeep Raina, Senior Vice Prsident – Sales, Inspira Enterprise; Mr. Deepak Sahu, Chief Editor – VARINDIA; Mr Arvind KS, Associate Vice President, Business Development - Tally Solutions; Mr K K Shetty, VP - Enterprise Sales, India - COMMSCOPE; Mr Sriram Gopalaswami, Head, Commercial and DCG Marketing- Lenovo India and Mr Jatin Christopher, Director- JCSS global Consulting

VARINDIA has recently conducted its annual Tech Summit in Bengaluru (Silicon Valley of India) - Southern India Information Technology Fair 2016, on 23rd September 2016 at The Hotel Chancery Pavilion, Bengaluru. The Summit discussed various emerging technologies that has hit the Industry in the recent past. The theme for the summit this year was “Innovative Platform to support Digital India”. A special team was invited to deliberate on the topic of Impact of GST on the ICT Industry, which was attended by experts from the Finance and Taxation domain, Consultant, CIO, VARs and the Industry leaders. Finally there was the award function that felicitated the business partners from Southern India in addition to the technology showcase that displayed the stellar leadership and outstanding IT implementations. VARs are the pillar of success in their respective regions representing the most innovative IT leaders in Southern India. The event focused on digital disruptions surrounding today’s world and its implications on Design & Engineering domain, given the need to leverage innovations to ring about a paradigm shift. It was a unique platform for SMEs and VARs to understand the scope of digitization that will open up big opportunities for them in due course of time. With a distinguished list of speakers including K K Shetty, V.P- Enterprise sales-India – COMMSCOPE; Vishal Dhupar, MD South Asia- NVIDIA India; Jatin Christopher, Director- JCSS global Consulting; Syam Madnapalli, Global IOT Delivery - DELL Digital Business Services; Kuldeep Raina, Senior Vice President – Sales, Inspira Enterprise India; Arvind KS, Associate Vice President, Business development- Tally Solutions, the summit promises to be an event full of stimulating conversations and innovative solutions. The summit brings the Strategists, Practitioners, consumers on to a one platform to discuss the strategy for adoption of digital solutions for enhanced design and engineering.

Arvind KS, Vice President, Business development- Tally Solutions “GST is new to everyone of us. In India doing business is a crime and doing crime is a business. There has always been a trust deficit between the tax authority and the businessman. Going forward, if GST is implemented properly, business in India would be no longer a crime. Tax is one thing which is very important for any business but it is also the thing on which the businessman should be spending the least amount of time in order to become tax complaint. If you are into the business of computers, please do not spend time on taxation at all. In today’s world the cost of being compliant is much cheaper than the cost of evading taxes.”

Vishal Dhupar, M.D (South Asia) - NVIDIA “After the wheel was discovered, the most pervasive inventions to have taken place was the printing press, next came electricity, semi-conductor and then eye-glasses. Out of all these, semi-conductors have always been taken for granted. The impact of semi-conductors is such that they contribute the entire economy of India to the global GDP. The whole hyper-connectivity that has got connected where you are talking about a billion active users on Facebook, 7 billion mobile devices being available - all these will cease if there are no semi-conductors. We today talk about IoT, Big Data, Cloud, autonomous vehicles, and these are opportunities around us.”

Jatin Christopher, Director- JCSS global Consulting “GST is a significant change agent as we embark on the journey that has just been introduced to us. It is very different from the way we have seen taxes – excise, VAT, service tax but the principle of GST which is the first aspect that we have to keep in mind, that GST is a destination based tax. It is the tax that has to reach the state where consumption actually takes place. Until now, we have been used to paying tax on an origin based system of taxation. Whenever you sell, supply any goods or services within your state, you will have to pay a dual tax – CGST and SGST. Both the taxes will apply at the same time.

K K Shetty, V.P- Enterprise sales – India, COMMSCOPE “If you look at the macroeconomic indicators, inflation you would see is roughly around 4-6%, GDP growth is 7.5% and if you look into the fiscal deficit, it’s almost 4% and this year we are planning to bring it down to 3.5%. Our rupee is more or less going up, as a whole the macroeconomic is fantastic now. That shows that the country is moving in the right direction, which shows that there are some good opportunities coming in the next few years. In terms of foreign exchange reserves, we have more than $370 billion, which means moving forward we can expect better days. GST is the mother of all reforms which will change the taxation scenario.”

Kuldeep Raina, Senior Vice President – Sales, Inspira Enterprise India “There is a huge opportunity and a potential about the Cloud. Inspira on its part is initiating a Center of Excellence on the Cloud which is now going to address infrastructure as a service, platform as a service and predominantly software as a service. A typical question that comes to mind is what people think about Cloud. Is it something that we are trying to do some kind of a value addition to it? When seen from a technology perspective, it is really the thing we are looking forward to? The first key point I consider when talking about cloud is automation that will transform it thoroughly.”

Talking about the day’s agenda, Deepak Sahu, Publisher & Chief Editor – VARINDIA spoke about how the future is cloud and the market for cloud services has grown to such an extent that there is now a notable percentage of total IT spending, helping to create a new generation of start-ups and "born in the cloud" providers. “The ‘Cloud Shift’ will affect more than $1 tn in IT spending and Digital technologies are playing a key role in enhancing SMB competitiveness and their growth agenda. As SMBs and their workforce embark on their digital journeys, they need to protect themselves against cyber-attacks. This would contribute to two strategic programmes of the country that are ‘Make in India’ and ‘Digital India’,” he said in his speech. K K Shetty, V.P- Enterprise sales – India, COMMSCOPE spoke about the Reforms & Opportunities in India, focusing on strong Indian economic indicators, expected to gain a double digit growth in medium to long term, resulting in India emerging as the fastest growing major economy in the world. His speech ended with a quote, “If you are optimistic you can build an Aeroplane! If you are pessimistic you can build a parachute!” Adding to his thoughts, Vishal Dhupar, M.D (South Asia) - NVIDIA India, said how the cloud brings huge potential for the growth and it is very supportive to the success of the Digital India. The summit always tried to bring conversations around how to ensure engineering and innovations in alignment to the requirements of world. Addressing the gathering, Jatin Christopher, Director- JCSS global Consulting spoke on what is the impact of GST on IT trade and how it will turn India into one common market, leading to greater ease of doing business and big savings in logistics. Some companies will gain more as the GST rate will be lower than the current tax rates they pay; others will lose as the rate will be higher than the present effective rate.

There is no doubt that Digital Business Transformation is disrupting businesses in every industry by breaking down barriers between people, businesses and things. By breaking these barriers, they are able to create new products, services and find more efficient ways of doing business. To address this segment, Kuldeep Raina, Senior Vice President, Inspira Enterprise spoke on the importance of cyber security and INSPIRA’s initiative towards Centre of excellence in the cloud as the Infrastructure and platform as service and Software as service. Kuldeep spoke about how things would be with value addition to the cloud and turning Capex to Opex with the help of automation, which will bring value to the customer and lastly gave some example of certain recent cyber and malware attacks. Arvind KS, Vice President, Business development- Tally Solutions spoke on the Impact of GST on IT trade and how GST is a business opportunity for us. This will bring a new opportunity for every company into development, since there is no software available in India, which is fully compatible or is GST complaint.

Panel Discussion on “ERP its uses and application under Digital India”

(From Left to Right): Deepak Kumar Sahu, Chief Editor – VARINDIA; Sriram Gopalaswami, Head, Commercial and DCG Marketing- Lenovo India; Syam Madnapalli, Global IOT Delivery - DELL Digital Business Services; Sridharan, President- AIT; Vishwanath Kulkarni, Director-Sales (India & SAARC) - HID Global and K K Shetty, VP - Enterprise sales-India - COMMSCOPE

The panel discussion held towards the end of the event, based on the theme for the day “Innovative Platform to support Digital India” was moderated by Deepak Kumar Sahu, Chief Editor – VARINDIA. The panellists who joined on the dais were Sriram Gopalaswami, Head, Commercial and DCG Marketing- Lenovo India; Syam Madnapalli, Global IOT Delivery - DELL Digital Business Services; Sridharan, President- AIT; Vishwanath Kulkarni, Director-Sales (India & SAARC) - HID Global and K K Shetty, VP - Enterprise sales-India - COMMSCOPE.

Before throwing open the floor to the panellists, Deepak Sahu mentioned about the report of IDC, Global IoT Decision Maker Survey which shows that the organizations are pivoting away from proof of concept projects to scalable Internet of Things (IoT) deployments that are incorporating cloud, analytics, and security capabilities. 31.4 per cent of organizations surveyed have launched IoT solutions, with an additional 43 per cent looking to deploy in the next 12 months. 55 per cent of respondents see IoT as strategic to their business and as a means to compete more effectively. Improving productivity, reducing costs, and automating internal processes are seen as top benefits of an IoT solution. This highlights an internal and operational focus by organizations over the short term as opposed to external, customer-facing benefits. On a cautionary note, he said that we all have to always bear in mind that Cyber Security is becoming more critical than ever before.

According to K K Shetty, VP - Enterprise sales-India – COMMSCOPE, Digital India is a priority as the various government initiatives introduced like Jan Dhan Aadhar Yojana cannot be accessed unless there is a Digital platform. “We at Commscope are focusing on Connectivity solutions which will provide digital infrastructure. We are also associated with the NoFN project, wherein 400,000 villages are going to be connected with fibre optics. With 4G network getting further penetrated, we are also planning to provide Fibre-to-Home.”

Vishwanath Kulkarni, Director-Sales (India & SAARC) - HID Global said that HID is also moving ahead in the Digital India agenda. “We have set up our R&D facility here in Chennai in which we are working on access control on mobile and a part of Digital India movement. We also have a solution called goID (Government ID) that has received wide acclaim from government of different countries.”

Sridharan, President- AIT opined that because of Digital India, the dealer community will get an opportunity to sell various end point devices like phones, laptops, etc. The convergence of technology also brings in lot of opportunities for those people who are into offering solutions.

Syam Madnapalli, Global IOT Delivery - DELL Digital Business Services felt that most of the companies do not have a good understanding of their customers. Digital Transformation, according to him is bringing visibility for the companies, about their employees, customers and stakeholders.

Sriram Gopalaswami, Head, Commercial and DCG Marketing- Lenovo India said that from an infrastructure standpoint, Lenovo is one of the many companies to have partnered with the government when the Digital India first started. “To Lenovo, Digital India means 2 things – making affordable devices available not only in 1st tier markets but to different tiers of markets. Secondly, Education being an important propeller, Digital transformation is the proliferation of digital means of education.”

Lastly there was the panel discussion, based on the theme for the day and moderated by Deepak Kumar Sahu, Chief Editor – VARINDIA. The panellists who joined on the dais were Sriram Gopalaswami, Head, Commercial and DCG Marketing- Lenovo India; Syam Madnapalli, Global IOT Delivery - DELL Digital Business Services; Sridharan, President- AIT; Vishwanath Kulkarni, Director-Sales (India & SAARC) - HID Global and K K Shetty, VP - Enterprise sales-India - COMMSCOPE. Discussion on Digital India, which is an initiative of the central government to integrate the government departments and the people of India and the innovation challenge, was to find solutions which can enable public to avail government services easily. Digital India in its vision is a disruptive social equalizer in it that empowers the citizens. It is targeted at addressing local needs with the vision to build an ecosystem for pervasive technology adoption. Technology provides a great platform for social equality and paves the way for opportunities enabling citizens to grow. India Inc enables the realization of the Digital dream by partnering with the Government in building Tools such as -

• Last mile Connectivity • Citizen services delivered over web and more importantly mobile • Cyber security Solutions • Healthcare powered by Cloud, Mobility, Analytics, IoT, Wearables, M2M tech • Education powered by Cloud and Contextual Awareness • Product & Service Aggregation Platforms • Modern Agriculture powered by IT Framework • Smart Cities

Building the infrastructure, getting various public sector departments online, providing a bouquet of desired services to citizens, all hold out significant potential for technology companies to work closely with the Government in realizing the Digital India Vision. Further, Internet of Things has altered traditional designing and the industry is pushing the envelope to ensure that demands are met and new standards are set in this domain. We are still lagging behind in broadband penetration as low as 6%. Also there is less information and education of people in terms of what is data stealing and privacy breach. Driven by several factors - technological advances, changes in competitive landscape and consumer preferences. IoT (Internet of Things) will describe a system where Internet is connected to the physical world via ubiquitous sensors will talk about the various facets of the IoT and how it is an imperative for the world today.

The summit also displayed the latest technology showcase from Canon, Tally and Inspira and how their solutions are well fitted to complement Digital India and the Future. The summit also witnessed a mix of CIO/CTO/System Integrators and Solution Partners from across the Southern India with 150 attendees from the ICT sector who is embracing digital solutions. A pantheon of industry veterans and innovators had conversations around themes and issues of critical importance to the growth of Security and social media. SIITF served as a unique platform for the IT professionals from across the country which helped them to find solutions to help their companies evolve with changing requirements.

Recognition with Awards (7th SIITF)

The summit held an award ceremony to facilitate the enablers of the IT industry in Southern India. There were seven partners who had been recognised with awards -

• BEST Network Integrator, Southern India - Newwave Computing PVT. Ltd. • Best Reseller, Southern India - Systech services Ltd. • Best Software Services, Southern India - Microcom Solution Pvt. Ltd. • Best Solution Partner, Southern India - FUTURE BUSINESSTECH INDIA PVT. Ltd. • Best Value Added Distributor, Southern India - INSPIRA TECHNOLOGIES • Best System Integrator, Southern India - VALUE POINT SYSTEMS • Best Value Added Reseller, Southern India - N J DATAPRINT PVT. Ltd.

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