Sandeep Swaminathan's Weblog

Computer Society of India organized a seminar on “IT Careers” on 3rd of July,2009 at Dr. MGR Educational and Research Institute, a current trending topic as thousands and thousands of engineers are in a state of dilemma wondering whether they have taken a right decision in their life by choosing to start a career in software industry. Around 400 students participated.

Programme started with a traditional inaugural speech from Mr. S. Ramasamy, Chairman, CSI, Chennai. A brief introduction about the schedule of the seminar was given by the most gleeful person of the CSI, freelancer Mr. H. R. Mohan. It was indeed our great prerogative to get the inaugural address from Mr. Mahalingam, President of CSI and CFO of TCS, one of those pioneers who is still today serving TCS for more than fourty years.

Mr. K. Ananth Krishnan, Vice President and CTO of TCS started off by speaking about the ‘Technology trends in IT’. With his superfluous english and cognizance, he enlightened us on the current development in Web 2.0, how people are influenced by social networking platforms and a lot of first-hand information on SaaS (Software as a Service) and cloud computing.

Mr. Mahesh N Iyer, COO, iPath Technologies,  followed Mr. Ananth Krishnan and gave a detailed talk on ‘Mobile Technologies’. Well it wasn’t merely a talk, rather it was a presentation of a contextual experience. He stated with some brilliant statistics about the growth in mobile and GPRS users, explained the business model of VAS (Value-added Service) with a real-time example, iAllWays, an end to end information flow management system developed by iPath Technologies. The second part of his speech was much of self-introspection.

Ever knew the foundations of data mining was mere statistical analysis and pioneers were stat software companies such as SAS and SPSS? Atleast for me, not until then. Mr. R. Sridhar, Director Business Solutions, OBSI Technologies presented the competencies, technical, analytical and management aspect of business analytics. Then he switched over to data mining and data warehousing. An hour of a mere technical talk, Mr. R. Sridhar, wanted all of us to use some geeky stuffs and tools of database.

The uninterrupted three hour session was followed by Mr. V. Natarajan, Director, Image College of Arts and Animation. He spoke brillantly in need of innovative youngsters for this new diverse animation and gaming industry. And we all broke for lunch.

Mr. N.S.N. Pillai, Head, Information Security and Risk Management, Ashok Leyland got the toughest time to deliver his lecture, after lunch hours. But his mesmerizing words are still fresh in our minds. He spoke about the need in extra investment for information and data security.

And then came my favorite. Open Source and Oppurtunities lecture, was given by Mr. Rajesh Iyer, Vice President – IT, Essentia Soft Solutions. He cited about Google ‘Summer of Code’, Release Candidate (RC’s), about government’s interest in OS. He also encouraged all of us to not only use open source but also revert back with proper feedback to the developers. According to him some of the best practices of OS are User Involvement, Peer Code Review, Transparency, Collective Data Ownership and Distributed Model. He quoted that “You are industry ready even before you graduate by your participation in OS community development!”.

Mr. Nikhil Indrasenan, Business Head, Ma Foi Academy gave a brief lecture on IT Career at Crossroads which was a mind-refreshing session. The best part of the seminar, according to me, was the panel discussion on ‘Education and Employment’ by some eminent and experienced professionals like Dr. Muthukrishnan, Ex Director In Charge, IITM, Dr. Agarwal, Ex VC, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, Mr. S. Srinivasan, CEO and MD of SRA Systems, Mr. S. Sridharan, Sr. VP, IT, Orchid Chemicals and Mr. N. Chidambaram, Director, IT, Ashok Leyland. The whole discussion was interactive and I luckily happened to shoot out some questions and got applauded for the same.

Prof. P. Thrimurthy, well-known for his sense of humour, gave the concluding remarks. As promised, the whole seminar was informative and I had a great experience. Thanks to CSI and the organizers.