The lamp lighting was preceded by a motivational speech given by Mr David Wittenberg, CEO, The Innovation Workgroup, who addressed the guests in general and the VAR community in particular to talk on how to think out of the box and implement the same in the technology offerings and solutions that they give to their customers. "You have to be different to be better to go faster and have a competitive advantage over your competitors. Every customer you serve wants to have something better from you than what your competitor provides in order to increase their market share and profitability. If you simply continue selling just the base solutions and products and not thinking of what it is going to do to them, you will limit your growth to just becoming a VAR. But there is a breakthrough innovation level that you should think of crossing."

In his address, Shri Deepak Kumar Sahu, Publisher, VARINDIA, stressed on the fact as to how marketers are investing in customer experience to drive business advantage and profitable revenue growth. "The far-reaching impact of digitization in today’s world has offered unprecedented value and intelligence to marketers and organizations and the entire world is eyeing towards the scope and opportunity in our country. It is an exciting time for the Indian IT sector to develop an ecosystem to see opportunity in digitization and various smart city projects".

Mr Josh Flouger, Director, India Operations Program and President, Nokia SEZ, in his address, cited some instances from Nokia’s plant in Chennai that has been shut down on November 1. “In our Nokia factory, we used to make 7 phones and about 14,000 components were getting assembled every second. To do this, we used to fly one jumbo jet a day to the Chennai airport and have 5 containers coming in through the sea. Inside our SEZ, we had 9 trucks running all the time and 10 trucks coming in daily from local suppliers. Having put these figures in front of you and with an experience of 10 years in the industry in the manufacturing space, I would like to state that a ‘Make in India’ is indeed possible."

Taking the “Make in India” slogan forward, Shri S. N. Tripathy, IAS, J.S., MSME, Government of India, hinted at how “Make in India” is no longer a dream and is going to be a reality very soon in the country. I quote an economist I met in the morning today who said that there is a huge possibility that whatever we do we will grow at a minimum of 5%, with a little bit of reform we can go up to 7% and with aggressive reforms we can get a 9% growth in GDP. A mega trend visible now is that of the growth of the service sector that will grow up to 80% from the current level by 2020. Cloud Computing which was a distant reality some time back has become a trend that is fast gaining momentum. Likewise, there are a few other technology trends that are visible today which the Government is, if not fully but gradually gearing up to adopting it."

Shri Sunil Soni, IAS, Director General, BIS, Government of India, spoke how BIS is working towards making the “Make-in-India” campaign a success by proposing standards in products manufactured in India. “We in BIS feel two things – the message is clear that we are not ‘Making’ in India for India alone but for the entire globe. Even as we talk about this campaign, there should be some standards maintained. BIS is working in this direction of proposing to the Government of harmonising our standards with that of the global requirements, so Indian manufacturing is able to join the global supply chain. Also, whatever is supplied to the Indian consumers is of the best quality. India cannot be made just a dumping ground. As a result of this, the Government through DIETY has notified some 15 products which should be brought under mandatory certification."

Shri Vishal Dhupar, Global Head (Business Development), NVIDIA, spoke at length about the semiconductor industry. “Fundamentally, we come from an industry where we don’t give regard to the world’s most pervasive innovation that we have faced – the semiconductor. In IT, the least spoken thing is the semiconductor. If we go beyond this industry, nobody tries to understand that without semiconductor, there will be no internet, no mobile device, no autonomous driving that is going to help mankind.">

The Star Nite Tech Byte Session saw a few eminent speakers from the industry talk about technology and how the speakers who spoke during this session were Shri Vipin Tyagi, E.D.. C-Dot; Dr. Alok Bharadwaj, Executive Vice President, Canon India; and Dr.Debabrata Nayak, Chief Security Officer, Huawei Telecommunications.

Going with the tradition of Star Nite Awards, VARINDIA also recognized the Business & Marketing Wizards, Technology Evangelists and CEOs of the Year 2014 from across the industry. The veterans came up on the stage and were felicitated with a token of appreciation.The most-awaited attraction of the evening was, however, the gala Award ceremony that took place amidst grandeur and celebrations. A total of 64 categories were announced this year and close-to 50 vendors were awarded for their remarkable contribution in their respective field.There was also a Lucky Draw contest organized by Epson, Canon and Dell amidst the event where lucky winners walked away winning 2 Epson printers, 3 tablets from Dell and 2 Canon Colour laser printers.