VARINDIA's 17th Annual Star Nite Awards witnesses VAR Symposium

From Left-to-Right: Krishna Raj Sharma, Director & CEO - iValue InfoSolutions; Rajesh Kaul, Senior Director - Tech Data India; Amalendu Mukherjee, Managing Director - Fourth Dimension Solutions; Alok Gupta, President - PCAIT; Champak Raj Gurjar, President - FAIITA; S Mohini Ratna, Editor - VARINDIA; Dr. Deepak Kr. Sahu, Publisher - VARINDIA; N K Mehta, MD & CEO - Secure Network Solutions; Rajiv Kapoor, Vice President, India & SAARC - Cambium Networks; Bharat Sharma, Director, Presales - India & SAAC - Cambium Networks;  and Pradeep Suri - Partner Business Manager - VMware India 

This year’s VAR Symposium provides opportunities for India’s Top 100 VARs to learn about RPA, Virtualisation, opportunities in Wi-Fi and its implications on the channel growth and newer business opportunities - 

The VAR Symposium 2018 that concluded at Hotel Taj Palace, New Delhi on 23rd November has been specially designed to create aconducive platform for discerning industry folks to converse, learn, and disseminate knowledge & ideas. The daylong session included discussions on new business strategies to discover how to capitalize emerging customer needs. The main attraction of this year’s event was the presence of the 110+ CEOs from the VAR community including system integrators, solution partners, IT service providers, VADs and VARs from across the country, who converged under one roof to share ideas and drive discussion on the topic of Digital Disruption that is already shaping the industry. The event witnessed 4 Corporates giving their presentations on their service offerings that includes VMware, Schneider Electric, UiPath and Cambium Networks.

The theme for this year’s event was "Accelerating Digital Transformation”, around which most of the discussions revolved.

The event started with the lamp lighting in the presence of guests Rajiv Kapoor, Vice President, India & SAARC – Cambium Networks; Bharat Sharma, Director, Presales – India & SAAC – Cambium Networks; Ranjan Kumar, GM – Schneider Electric IT Business India; Champak Raj Gurjar, President – FAAITA; Alok Gupta, President – PCAIT; Pradeep Suri – Partner Business Manager – VMware India; Krishna Raj Sharma, Director & CEO – iValue InfoSolutions ; Dr. Deepak Kr. Sahu,  Publisher – VARINDIA and S Mohini Ratna, Editor – VARINDIA.

The event commenced with the welcome speech given by Deepak Sahu, Publisher & Editor-in-Chief, Kalinga Digital Media. He has highlighted the fact of how technology companies are rapidly expanding their portfolios through R&D or acquisition to provide new services to their clients. “Facebook is developing Messenger to become its search platform. Google is architecting a fiber connectivity network. Dell bought EMC to create an end-to-end hardware and software powerhouse. Similarly, convergence is driving the VAR industry as telecom companies incorporate leading routing and security services into their connectivity offerings. Now even cloud service providers are providing the market solutions directly to the end client. This brings newer opportunity to the VARs and Partners.”

In the corporate presentations, Pradeep Suri, Partner Business Manager – VMware India spoke about how technology is transforming every industry and businesses are slowly going digital and how as a channel-friendly company is VMWare helping partners achieve this. 

Ashutosh Kapoor, VP – Partnership, UiPath Inc. introduced RPA (Robotic Process Automation) to the partners and that a common enterprise RPA starting point is Finance and Accounting. 

Bharat Sharma, Director – Presales (India & SAARC) – Cambium Networks in his presentation said that LTE, 5G can be a very good backhaul option for wi-fi indoor and outdoor coverage, but the second option for partners and wireless service providers is to offer wi-fi-as-a-service or connectivity-as-a-service Ranjan Kumar GM – Schneider Electric IT Business India said that Schneider always talks about IT being on and everything on real time, while also ensuring that customers and their infrastructure always remains on. 

A total of 100 awards were given in different categories of Best Wi-Fi Partner, Best Smart City Solution Partner, Best Networking Partner,Best System Integrators, Best Solution Partner, Best Retailer, Best IT Service Provider, Best Sub Distributor, Best VADs, and Best Security Partner.

While 7 partners were awarded as the Best Wi-Fi Partners, 2 as the Best Smart City Solution Partners, 2 as the Best Networking Partners,23 partners were awarded as the Best System Integrators, 26 as the Best Solution Partners, 3 Best Retailers, 14 Best IT Service Providers, 14 Best Sub-Distributors, 6 Best Value Added Distributors and 11 Best Security Partners.