Pune IT Expo 2004 sees encouraging participation

Intel’s absence was quite conspicuous at Pune IT Expo 2004,
one of western India’s major IT expos, which started here on Feb 12. At all
the other expos held at places like Nagpur, Vadodara, Surat etc, Intel had taken
up huge pavilion for all the Genuine Intel Dealers and also held seminars for
end-users. But as reported earlier by The DQ Week Mumbai, Pune CMDA had shunned
off Intel due to the vendor’s stubbornness regard-ing payments.

However, the vendor was not missed as other Korean vendor
like LG made a huge impact with their huge stall all colored in red.
Surprisingly Microsoft hardware made its presence felt strongly with a lot of
red and white balloons across the stall, HP was also present with a huge ‘HP
Invent stall’, Canon, Epson and distributors like Kunhar Peripherals,
Mediatech, Zeta Technologies, Cache Tech-nologies, Elicon Techno-logies (the new
distribution arm of Lanbit) to name a few. AMD was however only present through
a few dealers.

Ashwini Agarwal, Country Manager (Imaging and Printing
Group), HP, inaugurated the function. Pune CMDA is also planning to invite a
celebrity from the IT industry or from the government to the IT Expo 2004 on all
the other days.

"The highlight of this years event was that the entire
IT expo was Wi-Fi enabled. So many of the vendors chose to launch their new
products, which was again a unique opportunity. There has been active
participation from all the members as there are 66 stalls just like last year
and we are expecting a crowd of atleast 3 lakh plus at the expo," said
Suresh Joshi, President, Pune CMDA.

Nancy Sudheer

Pune