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Will IT be ‘My Trade Fair Lady’ this time? Business sense
Poor turnout: The attendance at the BangaloreIT.in decreased last year when the venue was shifted to Tumkur Road.
There used to be a time when the annual convention of the Computer Society of India was the occasion for India’s biggest — and for many years, the only — showcase of the Information Technology industry. The organisers took the event across India, a different metro every year — and as the exhibition part of it grew and grew, they displayed considerable ingenuity in housing it: pioneering those jumbo air-conditioned pandals, one year in Kolkata’ s indoor stadium, another year on the grounds of Mumbai’s Sports Authority of India. Throughout the 1980s and well into the nineties, the CSI convention was the “only show in town” — nay, the nation — as far as the computer industry was concerned.
Then city-specific IT shows came — like the Bangalore IT.com and Kolkata’s Infocom show as well as the NASSCOM summit in Mumbai, in February every year and the massive Convergence India conference and exhibition on Delhi’s Pragathi Maidan, in March. Faced with these challenges, CSI adroitly reinvented itself as a more academic and professional conference, attracting a good slate of papers, but with a relatively small exhibition component.
The mantle of “India’s biggest IT show” should have fallen on Bangalore — and indeed it looked like that for the last years of the 1990s. But no longer. For some years now, the Bangalore IT event has been less and less attractive — and the two co-sponsors, the Karnataka IT Department and the Software Technology Parks of India (STPI), have not been able to attract the sort of top notch participation and sponsorship that results in a satisfying annual event. The Palace Grounds venue proved to be logistically challenging — particularly when it rained on the eve of the event. At any rate, a number of large tents on a soft ground is not what the global hi-tech industry expects when it is asked to participate in a major trade fair.
Frequent changes of event management partners — almost on an annual basis — as well as changes in the event’s name even — from Bangalore IT.com to Bangalore IT.in to this year’s Bangalore IT.Biz — merely underlined the lack of a steady gameplan. Shifting the event last year to the Bangalore International Exhibition Centre on Tumkur Road near Peenya, proved to be well-nigh disastrous when it came to attendance numbers. And in any case, what was there to see? For some years, the only consistently interesting sections of the Bangalore IT show have been the Indian States pavilion and the International country pavilions. The Indian part had reduced to local resellers.
One should not blame the organisers for this: The dozens of international IT players with a Bangalore base, who use the city to create so much of their Intellectual Property (IP) and flaunt their Fortune 500 status, are apparently too strapped for cash to fork out a few lakhs of rupees so that the city and country that contributes so much to their bottom lines, can get a sense of what they are doing and what they offer to the world. This is one way of saying “thank you” India. Someone should tell our snooty guests that sometimes participating in an expo cannot be a mere matter of cost-benefit analysis — how many bucks of business can I get for every buck spent on participation. Sometimes, you have to put down a flag and take stall space that just says: “This is who we are! Walk in and see!?”
This year two other bodies — the Manufacturers Association of Information Technology and the Indian Semiconductor Association — have come on board to partner the perennial sponsors. Let us hope they tell their members , many of them global players, “IT’s not all in the winning (of business), but as much in the taking part.” And yes; the event returns to the Palace Grounds this year on November 6, 7 and 8. Let us hope the rain gods are kind. Let’s hope that to get there, we don’t have to ask like Prof Higgins in My Fair Lady: “And where’s that soggy plain?”
ANAND PARTHASARATHY
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