Connect 2001 to highlight benefits of IT advances

By Our Special Correspondent

CHENNAI, SEPT. 4. The right event coming up at the right time - the global and domestic economic slowdown and the meltdown in information technology. This is how the Chairman of the Tamil Nadu Council of the Confederation of Indian Industry-Southern Region (CII-SR), Mr. T. Anantha Narayanan, describes Connect 2001, the international exhibition and conference on IT, communication technologies and bioinformatics, to be held here from September 13 to 16.

For, the focus of the event will be on enabling Indian businesses in both the manufacturing and service sectors to leverage the benefits conferred by IT to strengthen their competitiveness. Concurrently, this would mean enabling and encouraging IT companies to find ways of helping Indian businesses in their race to achieve competitiveness, Mr. Anantha Narayanan said.

Talking to The Hindu on the highlights of Connect 2001, to be held at the Chennai Trade Centre, the international trade fair complex, he said the advances made in the country as a whole and in the southern region in the past two or three years by way of extensive building of optic fibre cable links also bade well for exploiting the potential of IT including in e-governance and e- learning.

Besides IT, a new thrust area, especially in Tamil Nadu, was bioinformatics, with the State government planning to set up biovalleys and partnering with Cornell University for establishing a Biotechnology Park. It was, therefore, appropriate that the CII's Partner in hosting Connect 2001 was the Tamil Nadu Government. The Chief Minister, Ms. Jayalalithaa, who has affirmed her commitment to take forward Tamil Nadu's plans for IT and biotechnology, was scheduled to inaugurate the four-day exhibition.

The two-day conference from September 13 would feature experts and professionals on themes of current relevance. The session on IT in the new millennium would feature Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, Director, Institute for International Development, Harvard University (over live video), besides Dr. F. C. Kohli (TCS), Mr. Anthony Lim (Check Point Software Technologies) and Mr. Milan Gupta (Verizon Data Service Inc, U.S.).

The session on ``demystification'' of bioinformatics will be led by Dr. S. Sadagopan, founder-director, IIIT, Bangalore. The other speakers on this theme would include Prof. Sankar Krishnan, Principal and Mr. Ajay Dhankar, Vice-Principal, McKinsey and Co.

The relevance of e-infrastructure to e-learning (Mr. P. Rajendran, Chief Information, NIIT), to knowledge-based industries (Mr. Balu Doraiswamy, MD, Compaq India, and Prof. Carl Ullman, Zicklin School of Business, New York), to next generation networks (Mr. Anil Khosla, Alcatel India) and to e-governance (Mr. Rajat Kumar, Joint Secretary, Government of Andhra Pradesh) will be the focus of another session.

Changing faces of technologies will be dealt with by Prof. Ashok Jhunjhunwala, IIT, Chennai (cellular v WLL), Mr. Ian Campbell, MD, Ericsson India (3-G), Mr. Vijay Yadav, CommWorks (Internet Protocol), Mr. V. R. Srinivasan, Oracle South Asia (e-business transformation) and Mr. Rahul Swarup, VP-Satyam Infoway (virtual private networks).

A glimpse of Tomorrow's India will be given by Prof. Raghavan Parthasarathy (President, Strategy Consulting Group-U.S.), Mr. K. B. Chandrasekhar (CEO-Jamcracker Inc., U.S.) and Mr. P. Ramakrishnan, Director, IDA Infocom, Singapore). Mr. Indika Gunawardhana, Sri Lanka Minister for Higher Education and Information, will be among the participants in the valedictory session of the conference.

A CEOs' Round Table will be held separately off campus.

The Connect 2001 exhibition will feature IT solutions, technologies and services, platforms for business networking and IT infrastructure enablers from national and international companies, besides the governments of Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Business
Previous : 'Create smart environment to beat slowdown'
Next     : Monitor