Sessions
Trends, Challenges and Opportunities in Digital Convergence
‘Digital Convergence’ is a current dominant trend, fueled by innovations in Communications, Media and Entertainment.
There are several perspectives on Convergence including:
- Industry Convergence: Telecom, media and Internet industries are converging and are competing in the same space of digital content distribution
- Service Convergence: Voice, video, data and wireless services from Communication Service Providers (CSPs) are converging
- Network Convergence: Various network technologies used by the transport network of CSPs is converging on to a common technology - IP/MPLS
- Device Convergence: Until recently, mobile handsets were just used for communication. Today, a mobile handset is not just a phone, but also a camera, a FM radio, an MP3 player, a television, and so on
Three Screen Technology or Convergence of TV, PC and mobile is a dominant manifestation of this Digital Convergence. This enables users to access the same applications and services from anywhere and at any time using any device.
The panel discussion will focus on the challenges from the perspective of networking, media, storage, security, and wireless technologies in blending three screens - TV, PC and mobile - in a seamless manner.
Panel discussion on Trends, Challenges and Opportunities in Smart Energy and Green Communications
Recent advances in digital technology are changing the face of the utility industry. The world’s energy infrastructure is expected to undergo transformation in the coming decade, allowing two-way communications to control metered devices and monitor their status to deliver efficiencies. With digital technologies switching from analog to digital controls, metered data is going to become pervasive.
In many countries, demand for energy is growing at a faster rate than the existing generation capacity. Moreover, the cost of providing power is also increasing due to high fuel prices, rise in construction costs and capital expenses. This underlines the need for smart energy.
Furthermore, non-renewable energy needs to be conserved in order to prolong its life much beyond what is possible today. Sensor networks will play a major role in monitoring environmental conditions and actuating devices to optimize energy usage. In addition, new computing and communications devices need to be built with lower energy consumption and smaller carbon footprint.
Challenges in Exploiting Parallel Architectures for Software Programming
The world has never been as well connected as it is in the recent times and the emergence of Internet has opened up endless opportunities. This has a tremendous impact on the software engineering practices and in particular, how software is developed and delivered. This situation is compelling us to change the way we look at Global Delivery Model and software engineering.
Emergence of Parallel architectures is one such crucial development. It has created endless possibilities in software development and delivery. At the same time, it has also posed some challenges.
The panel will explore how organizations can face these challenges and will see how parallelization could be exploited to its fullest potential additionally in view of the latest scale-out trends in distributed computing like cloud architectures.
Trends, Challenges and Opportunities in Text Analytics
Information technology industry is moving rapidly from being data-centric to being knowledge-centric, creating more intelligent and knowledge-driven applications.
At the forefront of this transformation is ‘Text Analytics’ – specifically the challenges in harnessing a vast pool of knowledge locked in textual data. Such textual data exists in the form of web documents, newswire feeds, emails, blogs, customer comments and social networking sites.
This panel discussion will explore the business opportunities in Text Analytics and explore the technological challenges that must be addressed to fully exploit these opportunities. The panel will debate various approaches to solve the difficult problem of extracting information from text and attempt to answer the following questions:
- Why should businesses care?
- What innovations are required to develop effective text-analytics solutions?
Trends, Challenges and Opportunities in Cloud Computing
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) defines cloud computing as "a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction."
Next-generation enterprises are leveraging cloud computing technologies to meet the needs of the Internet age.
- Innovation through programmable co-creation web platforms: It’s not just about innovating yourself. It is about creating an ecosystem of sustained innovation through a programmable platform embedded with your services such as Amazon e-commerce and GoogleApps platforms. Cloud computing helps you build such massive co-creation platforms with new business models.
- Information Explosion and Real-time Analytics: Storage needs are projected to grow by more than 50% year-on-year. With technologies like Web 2.0, RFIDs and personalization, there is an increasing need for storing and processing more and more data in shorter durations. Cloud computing helps you build scalable storage and advanced real-time analytics platforms efficiently.
- Operational Excellence and Infrastructure Costs: Companies spend more than 70% of the IT budget on maintaining current IT infrastructure rather than adding new capabilities. And 85% of the infrastructure remains idle. So, there is a need for solutions that can reduce the operating expenses on current IT infrastructure. Virtualization and Cloud Computing provide technologies for reducing the CAPEX and OPEX.