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The show must drag on

The quarrelling organisers of Comdex India almost missed the day this year. Eventually, they finished between something and nothing.

IT World '98 / Comdex India, the national annual information technology show came to a close this afternoon.

It was held over four days and featured an exhibition and a technical conference on the theme 'Business without obstacles'.

Comdex India is considered to be a premier event on the IT circuit in the country. This year's IT event, which continues a tradition of the last six year, was held in the shadow of a realignment among the organisers.

One of the pillars of the events of earlier years, the Manufacturers' Association of Information Technology pulled out a few months ago.

The Show

The year, the event was quite subdued compared to previous years. The all-round recession, the Asian currency crisis, the funds crunch of major Indian companies, all took their toll.

Many major companies are reported to have spent their resources at the India Internet World that just preceded the Comdex fair. Besides, because of the quarrels among the organising partners there was some uncertainty over the show's hosting itself. The withdrawal of MAIT from the partnership didn't help matters either.

"A muted show," was the description of an industry veteran. "Most major Indian IT companies were missing. International presence was minimal and restricted to a clutch of Taiwanese hardware companies. No product launches were made and no new technologies were displayed. It is surprising that there is nothing of interest. I wonder how such an event can advance the Comdex show."

Vinesh Jha of Ahmedabad, an entrepreneur offering software solutions, was disappointed. "The quality of the show is below average," he was categorical. "This perhaps reflects the state of the software development in the country. We are nothing but a body shopper country. Such a show may be okay for the first timers."

P D Hodarkar, chief manager, Information Systems Tata SSL, a steel rods manufacturing company was at Comdex after a gap of a few years.

It is quite low key this time, he says of the Comdex event as the major IT vendors are not here. "I came to attend some of the conference sessions on Y2K."

Asit Mukherjee, general manager, management information and systems, Duncans Industries Limited, came from Calcutta for the show. "There was hardly anything impressive this time, no innovations were on display," he regretted. "Even the conference was pretty average."

Dr A K Chakravarti, adviser, Department of Electronics, Government of India, was at the show to "see what are the new products, packages solutions the Indian companies are providing and to assess what further facilitating role the government could play to advance progress."

He remarked about the participation of many government companies such as C-DAC, VSNL etc at the show as an outcome of the new openness and competition pervading the Indian society.

Cindy Chang, delegate from Taiwan, was convinced that India is the major market for IT in Asia but is not as sure about the usefulness of Comdex as an event to push Taiwanese hardware.

"This show is not the right show, this is about software," she said. On the other hand, Vincent Young of Micro-Star International Corporation Limited, Taiwan, a major manufacturer of motherboards and VGA chip sets, was quite happy to be at the show. "It helps us build our brand before coming into India in a big way," he said.

The major participants at Complex, however, felt reasonably satisfied with the outcome vis-à-vis their expectations.

Tata Consultancy Services had hired probably the largest floorspace at the exhibition halls. Says Surya Kant, vice-president, "This is a good opportunity for sending out the message of our leadership position in global systems, consulting from India. Our major products and services on display here are attracting huge interest."

Yang Ching-Hsiwng, manager, Jong-Chyang Computer, feels it is fairy worthwhile to be here for, "We have met around 10 potential partners for collaboration in India." Did the show meet his expectations? "Well, so far so good." Hsiwng said he would opt out of the Indian market if deals did not work with the potential partners they had identified.

Charles Lee, marketing manager, Bio Star Group, Taiwan, saw the trip to Delhi as exploratory. "Delhi is a nice city." he says, "The city is not very crowded and it is a very big place with impressive constructions. The Comdex show has helped promote our brand name and also to locate prospective local partners."

Visitors

The organisers have announced a figure of 420,00 over four days of the exhibition. Predictably, a majority of the visitors comprised students and those with a general interest in the industry.

Sundarajan of C-DAC said there was tremendous enthusiasm on the part of people visiting the C-DAC stall because their PARAM 10000 parallel processing supercomputer was on display.

Hundreds of scientific and engineering students followed the presentations on PARAM 10000 very carefully and asked many relevant questions, he said.

The large 'general interest' crowd notwithstanding, TCS was happy that their products could be exposed to a large potential user community.

A TCS executive welcomed the interest shown in the live demonstration of the software systems integration solution for the National Stock Exchange and the National Stock Depository besides their other networking solutions. "We had set up a special dish antenna for the purpose," he said.

The Java Village, put up by TCS drew tremendous response from visitors. Company executive Vijay Video said "Everyone is talking of about Java but here is a live interactive session on this emerging language."

Organisation

The general response to the effort for the physical organisation was quite positive. But several exhibitors talked of the various obstacles they faced in conducting their show.

Mahesh Jayaram of Tata IBM said "The organisers should have reserved three days for business visitors and one day for the public." Biostar's Charles Lee felt likewise: "A separate visiting period must be set for the end user." Cindy Chang felt the organisation of the show was mediocre compared to that in her home country Taiwan: "Everybody is here. It's difficult to do business. Besides, there are no phones accessible at easy reach, the air-conditioning is very bad and let's not talk about the toilets!"

The media centre

Another thing that many would wish to not talk about was the media centre. It was a disaster. Contrary to the conference theme of 'Business without obstacles', there was hardly any IT equipment in the place that could function.

The servers were down often and in any case shut off at 6.30 pm, a time when most media persons are rushing to file reports. But there is life beyond email. So, you thought. The lone printer failed most of the time too, destroying plans to make hard copies for faxing. And even if you managed to print some reports you would discover that the fax machine could not send documents long-distance. It was hooked to phone line that serviced only New Delhi!

Technical conference

"Very mediocre," declared Jayaraj, a delegate from Hyderabad. "I haven't learnt much more than what I can from reading the newspapers."

"I would rate the panel discussions at 4-5 on a sale of 10," said Sunil Mehra of SCO. "The quality was poor, with exceptions of course."

They should have ensured some foreign participation at the conference, considering that much of the technology comes from the West, felt Asit Mukherjee, GM, MIS, Duncans Industries.

Indraneel Banerjee, however, was quite satisfied with the idea of 100 per cent Indian participation, "Today, it's the Indian who is performing so well in US companies. Besides, many of the presentations were quite competent."

Finally, Jai Zende, an executive in a foreign investment bank, felt the fees charged for the conference was too much.

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