Global CTO Conclave at IMC 2022

Session 1.
The panelists left the audience with the thought, that real progress will only be made once 5G and related technologies reach the grassroots and and are able to make the difference to every single individual, not just in India, but in Bharat. And the investments for this will need to be put in place. This is very similar to what one of the CEO Conclave sessions had emphasized on earlier.

The esteemed panelists are Magnus Ewerbring, CTO APAC, Ericsson; Azhar Sayeed, Chief Technologist, – Cloud & Virtualization, Red Hat; Bejoy Pankajakshan, EVP – Chief Technology & Strategy Officer, Mavenir; Randeep Sekhon, CTO, Airtel; Akhilesh Tuteja, Global Head – Cyber Security Consulting & India Head – Digital Consulting (KPMG); Bryan Tan, Director- Connectivity Ecosystems, Facebook; Gautam Billa, Vice President – International Sales Engineering, Ciena; and Run Almog, Head of Product Strategy, DRIVENETS.

Session 2

The session concluded on an optimistic note that now that the underlying recipe is in place, with infrastructure, spectrum, towers, fiber, and above all, the brilliant Indian mindset to deliver what is expected India is on the verge of getting there, Good tailwinds as a growing device ecosystem, capability to make programmable network increasing almost exponentially, and chipset industry coming out of the trough are encouraging. And all of this will converge, over the next four or five quarters, as a foundation for the next decade.

The esteemed panelists are Atul Gupta, Partner at KPMG Head – Digital Trust and Cyber Global Lead – Cyber for Tech, Media and Telco (TMT), KPMG India; Hardeep Saini, Senior Director Engineering; Qualcomm; Shyam Mardikar, President & Group CTO Mobility, Reliance Jio; Gilles Garcia, Senior Director Business lead Data Center & Communications group, AMD; and Srinivas Gudladana, Head of RAN Engineering, Rakuten Symphony.

Session 3

There was concern expressed that India, unlike the US is likely to see a constrained infrastructure in the deployment of 5G, in terms of both fiber penetration per capita and data usage per capita. And that will need to be alleviated, with a need to invest and to spread the talent around.

The esteemed panelists are Werner G. Schaefer, Visionary Executive- Business Development, Sales, General Management & Leading Global Strategic and Sales Initiatives, Intel Corporation; Tarun Chhabra, VP & Mobile Networks India Head, Nokia India; Jagbir Singh, CTO, Vi; Shobhit Agarwal, Partner; KPMG in India; Jitendra Balakrishnan, Chief Technology Officer – Optical Networking, STL and Sanjiv Kapur, Co-founder & CTO, Truminds.

CT Bureau