Thursday 13 June 2013

My experience - "Member of the panel discussion" at an International Conference

It was two day Conference on 12th-13th June 2013, at Sofitel Hotel, BKC on "The Global high on Cloud summit". It was related to cloud computing and we have recently started a research activity on "Mobile Cloud Computing", so our group head suggested to attend this and get an insight about how the industry is adopting cloud and what issues and challenges are they facing.
On the morning of 13th the session started and I entered into the conference room, looking for a comfortable place to get seated and settled, the moderator of panel discussion had already initiated a panel discussion and this time members were not preplanned, as a Prof of class he started calling up the delegates randomly, my colleague and me were sitting at the last seat, in the age,experience and designation we were the junior most barely having 6+ years of total experience and months of experience in the field of cloud computing, while mostly the CIO's, CTO's, Executive Directors, MD's and all exalted dignitaries that everyone aspire to get added with his name, were present from renowned Industries like IBM, Oracle, Hero Moto Corp, Maruti Suzuki India Ltd, Essar, Sify etc .
Suddenly the moderator asked me to join the panel at the stage "oh No"  I whispered as it used to be in the MBA classes (no not me ;)), but this was not the class, I could not say NO I am not prepared or how can I join with u all luminaries, I had to suppress my nervousness and get up with confidence.
I got seated at the Dias with 5 other panelist the Director New India Insurance,  Executive Director – IT, JM Financial Services Ltd etc etc. Fortunately they did not asked me to initiate the discussion and one of the member started with what challenges are they facing, which are the issues need to be addressed and issues related to continuity, disaster recovery, availability and security while two of them were talking I got some time to prepare my speech, had a deep breath and gear up. As soon as the second guy finished the moderator said "Let us have the privilege to hear something from the lady ".
After my introduction I started with "As you  rightly said about the mobile reaching right up-to the "Paanwala", I would like to continue from there, the mobile has reached to masses but computer has not reached yet, we are looking forward for a solution that can bridge this gap and this is possible with the help of "Mobile Cloud Computing", So the vision is to allow everyone to use their mobile  as if they are using a computer system and the solution should be intelligent enough to identify the kind of device, bandwidth, network connectivity etc and scalable enough to match the capacity of the cloud, dynamically call the services of the cloud on to the mobile and  on the top of that it has to act like a plugin so as to become convenient for the user to install on his device, be it a low end mobile or high end tablets, For example I should be able to access all the features of Microsoft Power point from my mobile/ tablet itself in the way it works on desktop/laptop" . I brought a lot of questions to be answered and was counter argued by the other members as most of them were having their own cloud set up and they were trying to relate with the client server or thin client kind of architecture for mobile, then I had to convince them how different and usable it would be from client server, definitely a market need to be identified for this but every concept has some niche at the beginning.
Don't know what shape this idea is going to take in future but definitely I am happy that I was able to express my self, could remember something which my group head used to discuss and those exhaustive and difficult research paper from Berkley university had left some impression into my mind :)

5 comments:

  1. I am feeling very proud for you, Surabhi.

    The way u presented your views and idea..

    Best of luck for your work:)

    Regards,
    Amita

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  2. Super duper :) all the best for future :)

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  3. Congratulations! I can see you climbing the ladder.

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