On the 20th September, XIM, Bhubaneswar held a national level IT Summit called Envision'08 – Beyond the binary. The event was organized by XSYS, the systems committee of the college which gave the students the opportunity to interact with a range of leaders from across the IT industry. Today, the students were addressed by six leaders: Mr. Santosh Mohanty (Head, Global Technology Excellence, TCS), Mr. Arun Pingaley (Head, Product Management, Reveleus, Oracle Financial Services, formerly i-flex Solutions Limited), Mr. Srinivasan Komanduri (Office Managing Director ,Consulting, Deloitte US Entities in India), Mr. Sonjoy Mohanty (CEO - A Little World ), Mr. Abhijit Sen(AVP, Divisional Manager & Bhubaneswar Center Head at Infosys Technologies Ltd), Mr. Sudipta Ghosh( Senior Manager, Innovation Group, WIPRO);  The topic of discussion was Managing IT in the Changing Global Scenario. The discussion was moderated by Dr. Gopal Krishna Nayak, Director, IIIT & also a faculty at XIMB.

The event started with the lighting of the lamp by the director of the institute Fr. P.T. Joseph, Dr. Gopal Krishna Nayak and the various panellists. Also, the winners for the paper writing competition were announced. The first prize was bagged by Mr. S. Bala Vishwakumar and Mr. Mainak Das from XIMB, followed by Mr. Gaurav Gupta & Mr. Lakshaw Jawa from Institute of Management Technology, Ghaziabad and the third prize was awarded Mr. Nishith Gupta & Mr. Sumit Agarwal from Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.

The panellists stressed on the importance of IT in order to cater to the changing global scenario and how India should evolve from being a technical service provider to a business problem solver. They also spoke of how IT should try and manage the changes that happen within a company, such as acquisitions and mergers, elegantly. The importance of disaster recovery, data mining, data storage & sorting was also discussed.

The panellists spoke of the advantages of having a unique customer experience and then moved on to discuss the importance of agility and speed which help in converting a business strategy to a business process.
They also discussed issues like outsourcing of jobs to India and how we should work on improving our IT services so as to maintain the competitive edge that we have in the IT domain compared to the other countries.

The students were also given a practical demonstration of the evolving role of IT when Mr. Sonjoy Mohanty from A Little World showed them how a special mobile phone and an electronic device can be used to create Bank accounts for the villagers and issue debit cards. It was indeed very heartening to know that IT is now being used in such innovative ways.

This was followed by a highly interactive Question & Answer session in which the students asked a wide variety of questions related to the strengths and weakness of the IT industry.

In the end, Dr. Gopal Krishna Nayak summarized the talk and discussed how IT was influencing all the sectors and would play a key role in managing change in the global scenario. The panelists and Dr. Nayak also launched the magazine called X-ite for Envision '08 on behalf of the systems committee of XIMB.

The event was concluded with a vote of thanks presented by Dr. Sanjay Mohapatra , faculty coordinator of XSYS, the systems committee of XIMB. He expressed his gratitude towards the panelists and Dr. Nayak for facilitating such a healthy discussion, and also towards the administration and the student body for all the help and support and they gave in making the event successful!

Overall it was a very enriching experience and helped the students get a better understanding of the world of Information Technology.