Challenges for Kozhikode based IT companies in becoming a national player – Panel Discussion

The Indian domestic IT industry is slowly waking up. The number of small and medium industries are realising the need to be lean and IT is the only way ahead to build scalable businesses. Regulatory norms are being tightened and a lot of the submissions are now online. E governance is coming up in a big way. AADHAR is being implemented by most of the state governments. The number of cities with a million plus population is going to double in the next 10 years. There is a lot of opportunities for the Indian product companies to leverage on the India Growth story
and go national. However the challenges are many ; from product pricing to multilingual experts to implemementation and regional variances, that beside hiring cross cultural workforce, the finances, strategy, operations, logistics etc. The cloud provides opportunites, but there are challenges and needs complete rework on existing selling strategies.

Calicut Forum for IT (CafIT) is holding a panel discussion as an eye opener for the small IT companies in Kozhikode to look at there opportunities around the India growth story

Program Details

6:00 pm  – Welcome address by Ajay C Thomas, Sweans Technologies / President CaFIT
6:10 India growth story – 10 minute presentation – Duleep Sahadevan, Co-founder and director of Software Associates

6:20 Panel Discussion

George Ninan – B’tech from NITC (Former REC) brings over 20 years of experience in enterprise selling. Tech27
Duleep Sahadevan – 2 decades of product management and marketing expertise. Software Associates
Nishi Ranjan – MBA 23 years of sales and marketing experience in pan india operations. Arbitron Kozhikode
Sheje Chungath – 18 year of sales experience in banking and Business Intelligence. Sesame software
Anwar – B. Tech with 10 years of pre sales experience in enterprise segment. Aufait technologies
Leepesh Parat – Founder of Zestybeans. One among the fastest growing companies in the region

Vote of thanks – Sainul Abideen,Cybrosys Techno Solutions

8 pm – Subscribed dinner – Rs. 250 per head
Date – 29th August 2011
Venue – Asma Towers, IG Road, Kozhikode

Who can attend

Startups
Business owners
Senior sales managers
Senior marketing managers

Duleep Sahadevan -Chairman and moderator President (CafIT)
Schilen Sagunan – Managing director(Arbitron India)
Jaikish TG – Head of Technology (Software Associates, Calicut)
George Ninan -VP Sales and marketing (Tech 27, Calicut)
Bijth Ahammed -Managing Director (Aufait technologies, Calicut)
Fazal Mohamood -Principal consultant (Softguide, Calicut)
Vivek Ramesh -Tech research (Software Associates, Calicut)
Anvar TK – CEO (GreenLemon, Calicut)

The panelists and moderator combined bring over 100 years of IT experience

Topics

5 minute curtain raiser by moderator

Technology

• Social networking
• Cloud computing
• Green IT
• Low power computing devices – good things of a recession
• Virtualisation and data centre consolidation

India story

• Internet penetration and growth of E-Commerce
• Would UID replace ration card, voter id, driving licence no, passport number, pan, kyc, ration card and the mobile number
• Product innovation and startups
• Growth of domestic software markets – Can you build a national brand out of Calicut

Opportunities and challenges

• Current IT scenario at Kozhikode.
• Role of CafIT. NASSCOM emerge forum Kerala
• How does it affect the citizens of Kozhikode
• Bridging the gap – Hiring quality talent
• Back to Calicut campaign – Emerging destination for senior professionals.
• Role of NGOs in building IT community.

CafIT is pleased to invite you to the 1st session of NASSCOM’s EMERGE Forum (Emerging Companies Forum) in Kerala. We take pleasure in inviting you to this exclusive session on 18 July 2009, Saturday on “Sustainable Go-to-Market Strategies for Indian IT Companies”.

Indian SME and Large IT companies are competing at the same table with global majors for a pie of global software and product development revenues. With constraints like limited marketing budgets and sales bandwidth, can we still compete on an equal footing with our global peers?

These learning’s are applicable for small and large companies equally, perhaps even more so for small firms.

Link to : http://www.nasscom.in/Nasscom/Templates/Events.aspx?id=57029

CafIT and NASSCOM brings to you a workshop on ‘Product Management Role in Engineering a Product’.

Programme overview

To build a good product you need more than great programmers and testers. A variety of other skills come into play for a software product to be launched successfully. Product Management is a core skill that is critical to the success of Product Companies.

Product Management is a specialized function. Without getting this right you could build a great product that no one needs. Or forget a feature which a user really wants. If you solve the wrong problem – no one is going to buy the product. If you solve the right problem but the wrong way – not as many are going to buy the product.

The challenges are vast and there is an urgent need to mitigate these issues. Identifying opportunities, understanding relevant market dynamics and designing offerings and user experience are the key challenges.

How does a Product Manager

• figure out what to build when there is no customer sitting across the table defining the requirement ?
• ensure an effective User Experience ?
• And work with the tech team to arrive at the optimal feature set ?

It is not easy!

CafIT and NASSCOM brings to you a workshop on ‘Product Management Role in Engineering a Product’, where you will earn to leverage some of the best practices used by successful product organisations the world over.

The workshop will be facilitated by Hauroon Jamal, a product management expert who works with product startups.

Date : 20th / 21st June 2009

Venue : Hotel Asma Towers, IG Road, Kozhikode

This workshop will offer:

Part 1: Dynamics of product development
Part 2: Putting your stake in the ground
Part 3: Detailing out your product releasePart 3: Detailing out your product release

Key Outcomes from the Workshop :

• A clear understanding of the product management role in successful product launches and periodic releases and updates
• Learn key techniques for defining a product in a systematic and customer driven manne

About the trainer

Hauroon Jamal has spent the 4 years advising Indian software product makers on strategic issues. During this period he also partnered with Microsoft India on their Product Initiative and was responsible for its product engineering aspects. He conducted a number of workshops on product process and as a part of this effort interacted with nearly a hundred CXOs of product ventures.

Prior to this, Hauroon was a part of the Microsoft Product Development Group in Redmond where he spent 5 years building products. A bulk of the time was in program management of startup features within Windows.

After completing his B. Tech from IIT Madras in 1988, Hauroon joined Infosys in the application consulting segment. He did consulting in this space for 10 years before he got interest in products and moved to Microsoft

One day Workshop on Software Engineering Best Practices, Principles with Apt Documentation (at Asma Towers, Kozhikode)

Objectives

The objective of this two days workshop is to introduce software engineering best practices and principles related to the following topics:

•Development Process
•Requirement Management Best Practices
•Analysis and Design with Unified Modeling Language
•Software testing
Target Audience

This program is aimed at process engineers, project managers, CEOs, CTOs and all others who are interested to learn the software development best practices and implement automated solutions in each of the SDLC phases

Benefits
Participants acquire understanding of the SDLC phases, best practices to follow in each phase and how to implement an automated solution

cafITorganized a one day workshop on Quality Assurance, Software Patent Issues, and Project Management. Mr. Manu Balachandran, US Technologies, Technopark, Trivandrum conducted a presentation on Software Quality Assurance. He emphsized the importance of quality assurance in software development life cycle.

In another session of the workshop, Mr. R.S.Praveen Raj, Scientist – IP Management, RRL, Trivandrum, made a presentation on Intellectual Property Rights Issues in Software Industry.

Mr. Jayarajan of PMI Kerala Chapter, Trivandrum, conducted a presentation on Project Management.