With the participation of NASSCOM, MAIT, NACIT and The DQ
Week, the annual IT Expo orga-nized by the South Gujarat In-formation
Technologists Asso-ciation (SITA) has put the asso-ciation on the national IT
map.
Vinnie Mehta, Executive Dir-ector, MAIT, was the chief gu-est.
Guests of honor included Rajiv Vaishnav, Regional Dire-ctor (West), NASSCOM;
Saurin Shah, President, NACIT; Asim Raina, Editor, The DQ Week; Paras Shah, MD,
Neoteric Infomatique; and Ashok Shah, President, South Gujarat Cham-ber of
Commerce.
The program began with the traditional prayer, which was
followed by Paresh Bookseller, President, SITA, welcoming the guests. Then Dipak
Shethwala, Expo Chairman, gave the sali-ent details of this year’s event. This
was followed by all the guests jointly lighting the lamp and releasing the
souvenir. After the guests made their cus-tomary speeches, Hiten Shah, VP, SITA,
proposed a vote of thanks.
The Surat expo is conside-red to be the largest IT expo of
Gujarat. Held for the first time in 1997, this was the eighth consecutive event.
Organised over an area of 40,000 square feet–out of which 12,000 square feet
was the saleable area–there were a total of 161 stalls. Perhaps the most
interesting feature of the expo was an exclusive area set up called the WiFi
Zone, which was sponsored by BSNL and D-Link.
A lot of outside participation could be seen by the presence
of channel partners from the neighboring cities like Bhav-nagar, Ahmedabad,
Valsad, Baroda and also Mumbai. All the major vendors like Intel, HP, Canon,
TVSE etc were present in full form. Crowd turnout of close to 15,000 at the
three-day event and due to the mini budget there was an effect on the business
also.
Concurrent with the expo, a meeting of the representa-tives
of the channel associa-tions from all over Gujarat was held at the adjacent
Surat Police Station’s conference room.
The meeting was attended by associations from Ahmeda-bad,
Baroda, Valsad, Surat etc besides MAIT and NACIT. The representatives put
forward the major issues in front of the cha-nnel community and urged MAIT and
NACIT to resolve them.
DQW News Bureau
Surat