Gitex Hyderabad -2003, a premier international trade exhibition for the information and communications technology (ICT) industry, will begin at the Hyderabad International Trade Exposition Centre (Hitex) here on Wednesday.
The three-day event will be inaugurated by Pramod Mahajan, the union minister for information technology and communications.
This is the second successive year in which the event is being held here and is being jointly organised by Dubai World Trade Centre and the ICT department of the state government.
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Whereas just 45 companies participated in the first-ever Gitex exhibition held outside Middle East last year, against a 100-odd participants expected, the number of trade visitors too was not much large with almost no overseas business visitors and few outside the state.
This year, at one stage the organisers had to announce a 40 per cent discount in participation fee to attract more customers. This resulted in an increase in number of participants this year and expected participation from the companies is a bit higher at about seventy; so far 52 companies have confirmed their participation. There are a few participants from the Middle East, UK and Taipei this year.
Some of the big names among the participants include Microsoft India, Tata Consultancy Services, L&T Infocity, HSBC, Satyam, Polaris and VisualSoft Technologies.
Alongside the Gitex exhibition, the India IT Forum (IITF) is being held. It is a business-to-business conference organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) covering topics as eGovernance, IT-enabled business process outsourcing (BPO), new technologies and strategies.
The objective of the forum is to focus on the competitive edge of Andhra Pradesh in e-governance and IT-enabled services. International speakers who would be speaking at the conference include Donal O Brien, the chief technology officer of Wilco International, Adaire Fox Martin, the director of Oracle Corporation.
The IT secretaries of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka and Punjab would also be addressing the three-day conference.
A special plenary session on