The 9th edition of CIO Crown reflected on the opportunities that the evolving digital future presents.
CIOs have played vital roles in building enterprises that are ready for the world ahead. Digital technologies have become strategic priorities for every organization and CIOs have been exceptionally successful in ensuring a seamless shift to the digital-only, digitally-fueled future models for enterprises.
In the last 18 months, IT leaders have not only accelerated their digital transformation agendas, but have also very masterfully crafted new business models, customer experience journeys and new ways of working. Technology, by every possible means, is the epicenter of innovation for any business.
And yet, Digital is an evolving journey—one which requires business technology leaders to constantly “rethink, revaluate and redefine” as they forge ahead. The 9th annual edition of CIO Crown, CORE Media’s flagship event that brings together India’s top technology, industry and thought leaders onto a single platform, shone the light on the evolving digital future.
CIO Crown 2021 – All Online brought together the best of business technology leaders, practitioners and industry experts from across domains and industries.
Through a highly curated ~4 hour virtual symposium, the audiences had some key takeaways around this year’s theme — “The Evolving Digital Future: ReThink – ReValuate – ReDefine”.
The event offered deep insights into a wide range of topics to help CIOs and IT leaders to digitally transform their enterprises. A series of keynote sessions, engaging panel discussions and fireside chats gave the audience a comprehensive view of the emerging digital trends and how they can be prepared.
Anoop Mathur, Founder & President, CORE Media, who delivered the welcome keynote, dwelled upon solving the “CIO’s dilemma” and how CIOs can focus on true future opportunities by effectively cutting through the clutter. He also touched upon the emergence of the ‘Expandiverse technology’ that is poised to transform businesses processes and customer experience through people-first approach.
This year’s independent keynote speaker Ruchira Choudhary - Leadership coach and author of the book “Coaching: The Secret Code to uncommon leadership” drew loud applause as she walked the audience through the journey of becoming an extraordinary leader.
CIO Crown’s C-Suite Digital Vision – a series of unique sessions with India’s top CXOs & CIOs, also received wide appreciation this year. This series presented eminent leaders namely Kirti Patil (Kotak Life Insurance), Sankarson Banerjee (RBL Bank), Satish Panchapakesan (Arvind Ltd), Vinay Khargonkar (L&T), Vineet Jaiswal (Vedanta Group), Vinod Bhat (Air Vistara) and Vrinda Pai ([24]7.ai). Each of the speakers laid out the future trends and digital vision specific to their industries and highlighted the emerging opportunities for tech leaders in key industries.
Other key highlight of the event was a series of panel discussions with top CIOs.
In an interesting Panel discussion led by Anoop Mathur, Shiv Kumar Bhasin, Group CTO & COO of the National Stock Exchange and Viswanath Ramaswamy, Vice President - Technology Leader, India South Asia, IBM, gave the audience a glimpse of how digital is redefining the future of the BFSI sector.
In another discussion, Prakash Ramachandran, CTO of Byju’s learning app and Sunil Chavan, VP - Emerging Technology Solution Sales, APJ at Pure Storage, offered unique insights into how digital-native enterprises are gaining competitive edge and providing compelling customer experience.
VS Srirangarajan -CIO Pulp and Fibre Business - Aditya Birla and Vishal Chahal - Director IBM Automation & AP Cloud Pak Labs, IBM Software Labs, did an in-depth exploration into how enterprises can thrive in a data-driven world. The session had some tangible takeaways for the audience in terms of how they can transform their data and AI programs to be future-ready.
Some of the other featured speakers of this year’s edition included:
Lingaraju Sawkar, President, Kyndryl; Michael GOH, Senior Director & GM – Asia, Iron Mountain; Nikhil Rathi, Founder & CEO, Web Werks Data Centers; Ritesh Gupta, Country Sales Director, Rubrik India; Satyen Vyas, CEO, Symphony SummitAI; Sachin Bhalla, VP, Schneider Electric Secure Power Division, Greater India, and Satbir Singh, Sales Engineering Manager -India & SAARC, Crowdstrike.
CIO Crown 2021 also served as the platform for several awards and recognition titles to honor Technology leaders for their outstanding contribution. CORE Media’s sought-after Digital Genius Awards and Healthcare Honors celebrated the accomplishments of CIOs across various categories.
The second edition of “Leadership Circle’ recognitions, powered by Nutanix, honored technology leaders who continue to lead their organizations towards growth and success, with their exemplary work and innovative approaches to technology.
The Digital Visionaries title, now in its second year, presented by ServiceNow, recognized CIOs for their remarkable digital initiatives and innovations that helped steer their organizations toward the digital-only future.
In addition to these titles, CIO Crown 2021 also felicitated CIOs who featured as ‘Sustainability Champions’, which honored IT Leaders who have been optimising energy consumption in their IT infrastructure, implementing smart and efficient strategies to achieve "sustainability” and ‘Digital Transformation Pioneers’, which was presented to CIOs who are driving unique and result-driven digital strategies that helped organizations to be on the fast track to growth.
On the whole, the yet another successful edition of CIO Crown served as a platform where CIOs and leaders discussed and brainstormed innovative ideas to thrive in the evolving digital future.