March 24, 2011
School of Engineering, Coimbatore
 

“The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.”
 

Quoting science-fiction writer William Gibson, Amrita’s Prashant R. Nair, Vice-Chairman, Information Technology at the Amrita School of Engineering, Coimbatore referred to various cutting-edge technologies in the IT space that were all around us.
 

“Often, signs of the future are there, but it isn’t until much later that most of the world realizes their significance,” he said.
 

Chairing a session on Emerging Opportunities at an IT event in Coimbatore titled Connect, Prashant was the only representative from academia.
 

Organized by Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), these series of IT events have been hosted by many different Indian cities for over a decade now.
 

Other sessions at the event included Trends in Convergence, Enterprise Applications for the Cloud, ERP for the SME, Embedded Systems and Scaling Software Product Business.
 

Speakers included Mr. Lakshmi Narayanan, Vice-Chairman, Cognizant; Mr. Jothiganesh Venkatraman, Vice-President, Mahindra Satyam; Mr. P.W.C. Davidar, IT Secretary, Government of Tamil Nadu and Dr. Santhosh Babu, MD, Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu.
 

After chairing the session, Prashant also moderated a panel discussion wherein speakers from Imorph and Orangescape deliberated on Cloud Computing and Mobile Applications.
 

Prashant has served as a panel member of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) at CII Coimbatore Zone since 2009.