NASSCOM EMERGEOUT Conclave Kolkata: The Event Ended But The Show Has Just Begun...

By Aninda Das, NASSCOM, Kolkata

The 6th edition of the NASSCOM EMERGEOUT Conclave in Kolkata on 28 January 2011 was a grand success. The theme of the conclave “Scale up your business: Challenges and opportunities” focused on the supply side issues like operational efficiency, human resources, finance & funding and sales and marketing, which confront an IT SME every moment.

The inaugural session done by Mr. Rajiv Vaishnav, Vice President, NASSCOM and Mr Ambarish Dasgupta, Chairman, NASSCOM Eastern Regional Council & Executive Director, PwC. In the keynote session, Mr Maninder Singh Grewal, MD, Religare Technologies, shared his insights on how to scale up business.

This was followed by tactical sessions on Sales and Marketing, Funding, Operations and HR. The speakers for these sessions were mostly entrepreneurs who are facing the daily challenges every day and they shared with the audience what has worked for them to overcome certain challenges.

A dedicated session with the CIOs from the user community titled as “Peep into a CIO’s mind shared with the audience, how they could manage to partner with them. The session was chaired by Mr. V. V. R. Babu, Sr. Vice President, ITC Infotech Ltd & Group, CIO, ITC Ltd. The speakers for the session were Subhasish Saha, CIO, Apeejay Surrendra Group, Indranil Guha, CIO, Spencers Retail Ltd, and Vishnu Gupta, CIO, The Calcutta Medical Research Centre.

The NASSCOM EMERGE East showcase identified and honoured the four emerging IT companies of East: Comunet Info-Systems Pvt Ltd , Orbital Outsourcing Services , Pinnacle Infotech Solutions, and Sun Knowledge Pvt. Ltd. that are redefining the benchmark of excellence for the next generation of SMEs. The award ceremony was felicitated by Dr Debesh Das, Minister of Information technology, West Bengal.

The add-on for this conclave was the pre-EMERGEOUT workshop called "Sales for Entrepreneurs Workshop” was held on 27 January 2011, which helped the young entrepreneurs on how to sell their products and services to early adopters. This hands-on workshop series was aimed at entrepreneurs & founders who are responsible for finding, nurturing and obtaining early paying customers for their products or services. The workshop will be led by Mukund Mohan who has over 15 years of experience in selling and partnering with customers.