God's own country takes partners to cloud 9

"Amazing location, genuine hospitality, great food and good content" were some of the most common words one would hear on the 9th SP Summit: On Cloud 9 where 55 IT solution providers across the country were invited to attend a two-day conference. The conference saw different types of solutions pitched by vendors as well as partners' on cloud.

On March 7, 2014 all 55 members gathered at the Thiruvananthapuram Airport and made way for the the backwaters leading to the resort. After a 10 minutes ride in the backwaters, solutions providers were welcomed in the actual venue: Poovar Island Resort. The reception seemed amazing with lovely ladies smearing the foreheads of the partners. It was getting hot but Soothing atmosphere of the lush green surrounding did offset the relatively hot season in Trivandrum.

After the lunch in the nicely set up conference room the sessions began. Rajneesh De, editor, DQ Week and Channels commenced the first day of the conference addressing the largest gathering of Indian system integrators in the God's Own Country in the 9th edition of DQ Channels SP Summit.

He reiterated, "We will discuss both business and technology challenges and also delve deep into our mental recesses through a hypnotism session during the program. Not to forget the Kerala martial arts and the pan-Asian and Kerala-themed dinners."

This was followed by a valedictory address by Pradeep Gupta, MD, Cyber Media where he emphasized on the role of social media on the day-today businesses. He cited the blogs of Suresh Ramani and Sanjeev Bhavanani and asked sitting partners to follow their lines.

 

After a formal round of DQ Channels' team introduction and lamp lightening session, the conference finally began. KV Jagannath of Choice Solutions also happens to be management trainer presented his view on Strategic Networking: Externally and internally, building leaders of the future. He emphasized that 80-90 percent of sales lead come through networking.

Sessions continued and some of the vendors came up pitching their solutions. But what made the partner's day was the presentation of a Mumbai-based partner Nityanand Shetty. He started with a loud roar and made everyone think that the partners are just not resellers. He asked them to specialize in part of the business and said, "We are entrepreneurs. Follow your DNA and think about one single focus point of the business."

Countering Jagannath on a lighter note, Anantharam V Varayur quoted Robert Kiyosaki: "'The richest people in the world build networks; everyone else is trained to look for work.'" However, he presented on security threats post Snowden leaks and showed 10 most used weak passwords in the year 2013. It was a revelation for most of us.

The attraction of the evening was Santosh Babu, founder and managing director, ODA ( Organisation Development Alternatives Consultants). He spoke on the topic: "Tapping your inner potential-mindfulness for better productivity."

What drew more attention than the previous one was his session on hypnotism where he emphasized on having a focused mind. He also hypnotized Suresh Ramani of Tech Gyan and left the audience dumb stricken. The first day ended with a boat ride for all partners in the narrow lanes of Kerala backwaters.

 

Second Day
On the second day of the 9th SP Summit apart from the different vendors' and partners' presentations, ISODA united together to look into the new opportunities on the shift of the business model of perpetual license to pay per use model on cloud. This was followed by a presentation by HP on converged storage. Another vendor Hitachi also discussed on the opportunities on cloud.

One of the informative presentations was from Sandeep Vahi, Compton Computers where his company provided power solution to an ATM in rural India capturing solar energy. Sunny Sharma, MD, Foetron also gave some powerful insights on the mobility trends in India. Citing one of the reports he said, "The most used browser in India on phone is UC Web." Earlier, he also represented Microsoft where he pitched in Office 365 solutions.
ASIRT on the other hand also caught the attention of most of the people where Kshitij Kotak, the president, showed ways to counter the threats of big e-commerce partners including some of the recent ones.

Award Ceremony Night

Planned well in advance, all partners were informed to dress up in ethnic wears for the award ceremony. The partners in their native ethnic wear gathered and proudly displayed it in the evening. Around 20 awards were conferred by the team DQ Channels excluding some of the lucky draw coupons.

The event of the day was Kerala martial arts performed for by localites. This was followed by a Kerala themed dinner which seemed exotic.

Reviews:
The good: Amazing location, good food
The bad: Heavy on content, partners missing the Cloud topic

#Special thanks to our sponsors: HP, Symantec, Ricoh, Hitachi, Cyberoam, Converged, BPE, ZYXEL.