Nasscom, Vidarbha body organising IT seminar to showcase Nagpur

Nasscom and Vidarbha Economic Development Council (VED) have jointly organised a two-day "national level" seminar 'OpportunITy Nagpur' to be held here on October 15-16.

The seminar will be inaugurated by Nasscom president Kiran Karnik in the presence of chiefs of many IT companies who have been invited to opportunities in Nagpur.

Karnik will also address students as part of the Knowledge Series - PossibilITy - at Deshpande Hall on October 15.

The seminar will bring IT honchos to the orange city for the first time, VED said.

In the invitee list are Prakash Gurbaxani of Transworks, Kirthi Ramamrutham of IITB, Girish Kulkarni of TDA Capital, Bhushan Gagrani of MIDC, Raj Patil of MphasiS, Avis of Image Equity, Shashi Chowdhary of Lambent, Ashish Kulkarni of Jadoo Works, Makarand Padalkar of iflex, Janakiraman of MindTree, Vijay Sukhtankar of IBM, Anindya Roy Chowdhary of KPMG, Anand Deshpande of Persistent, Raj Nair, Adarsh Bagaria of Spanco Telesystems, Rajiv Katial of NIIT, Sunil Mehta of Nasscom, Pawan Kumar of vMoksha, Rajeev Choudhary of Toonskool and Ananta Deb of Symtel.

The two-day event will cover topics such as infotech-enabled services (ITES) and business process outsourcing (BPO), software product development, animation and human resource practices and venture capital. On October 16, delegates will be holding one-to-one business meetings.

Institutions such as Neeri, CICR, JAL, CMPDI, NRCC have also been invited to participate in this session to offer domain knowledge for ITES. Government of Maharashtra, MIDC, Sicom, STPI and VASE have extended their support to the event, VED said.

President of VED, Vilas Kale said that at least two major Indian IT companies had expressed interest in expanding their operations and establishing presence in Nagpur. "This alone should give a fillip to the IT sector here as Hyderabad, Bangalore and Pune are becoming too congested," he said.

Kale said that VED was also trying to market the city's infrastructure and immense human resource (HR) potential.

"You only have to see the number of top quality engineering colleges we have here and the talent Vidarbha boasts of to realise that software industry can really take off here," he said adding that MIDC and STPIs (Software Technology Parks of India) are also taking an active interest in the seminar.