Unisys Cloud 20/20 Grand Finale : YourStory Exclusive

Global IT Company Unisys held the Grand Finale of Cloud 20/20 Technical Paper Contest at ITC Royal Gardenia, Bangalore today. The event marked the culmination of a national level technical paper contest hosted by Unisys, one of the biggest players in the cloud computing arena globally.

The technical paper contest was an initiative of Unisys to encourage innovative ideas and recognise the emerging technical talent from India's engineering colleges.Almost 1500 papers were received from more than 570 educational institutions.Deepak Karunakaran of IIIT Bangalore, Kiran GVR of IIIT Hyderabad and Karthik Sankar of NIT,Trichy won the first second and third places respectively.They won an Apple Macbook Air, Sony Vaio and a Nokia N97 respectively apart from an opportunity to be hired as interns by Unisys.

The event saw some exhilerating talks and panel discussions and a lively cultural program after that.

The Keynote Address was delivered by Bob Supnik who is the Vice President of Engineering and Supply Chain/CTO, Unisys Technology,Consulting and Integration Solutions.He spoke about the grand challenges when it comes to cloud computing .This was followed by a briefing about the contest by LNV Samy who is the Vice President of Engineering, Global Technology Center - Australia, China and India. He spoke about the idea behind this contest and highlighted steps taken by Unisys to foster research and innovation in India.

Dr Subhashis Sengupta, Architect, Oracle talked about the latest happenings when it comes to cloud computing in Oracle and also gave insight into Dhamani, a distributed fault tolerant storage overlay that is being developed by Oracle.

This was followed by the paper presentation by the three finalists which demostrated the talent in the Indian student community. After lunch there was a panel discussion on "Cloud Computing Trends to Watch for in 2010 and Beyond" saw prominent speakers from the industry discuss various aspects of cloud computing.The panelists were:

• Raghavan Subramanian, Head of Cloud Computing Centre of Infosys
• Deepak Visweswaraiah, GM, Storage Software Group at EMC India Centre of Excellence
• Ramamurthy Badrinath, Technologist, Hewlett Packard
• Bob Supnik, Unisys
• LNV Samy, Unisys
• Micheal Salsburg, Unisys, Consulting and Integration Solutions
• Mark Hodapp, Vice President of Cloud Engineering, Unisys

The noon session had talks by Dr Srinivas Padmanabhuni, Principal Researcher, R & D arm, Infosys and S Ranganathan, Founder Director Symindia Training and Consultancy Pvt Ltd. Ranganathan had the audience cracking with laughter and managed to inspire people in the short span he had got to speak.

This was followed by Prize Distribution Ceremony and after that a engaging cultural program by Natya Stem Dance group. The day ended with the guests unwinding at the cocktail party and dinner.