Keynote Speakers

Faqir Chand Kohli
Faqir Chand Kohli  is an Indian businessman. He is frequently referred to as the "Father of the Indian Software Industry". He was the first General Manager of Tata Consultancy Services, a leading Indian software consultancy company. He has also worked as the Deputy General Manager of the Tata Power Company. Kohli has been awarded the Padma Bhushan, India's third-highest civilian honour, for his contribution to the Indian software industry. He has also has been awarded honorary degrees from University of Waterloo, Canada, Robert Gordon University, U K, IIT Bombay, IIT Kanpur, Jadavpur University, Queen's University and University of Roorkee. He is also a fellow of IEEE USA, IEE UK, Institution of Engineers India, and Computer Society of India among others.

Parasuraman (“Parsu”)
Parasuraman is a Professor and Holder of the James W McLamore Chair in Marketing at the University of Miami. He has published over one hundred scholarly articles and research monographs. He has received many awards for his teaching, research and professional contributions, including the AMA SERVSIG’s Career Contributions to the Services Discipline Award (1998) and the Academy of Marketing Science’s Outstanding Marketing Educator Award (2001). In 2004 Parsu was named a “Distinguished Fellow” of the Academy of Marketing Science. He served as editor of the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science .He serves on ten editorial review boards and is the current editor of the Journal of Service Research. He is the recipient of the JAMS Outstanding Reviewer Award for 2000-2003 and the 2003 Journal of Retailing Outstanding Reviewer Award.

He is the lead author of Marketing Research, a college textbook published in 2004, and is a co-author of three other business books written for practitioners, Delivering Quality Service: Balancing Customer Perceptions and Expectations and Marketing Services: Competing Through Quality, and Techno-Ready Marketing: How and Why Your Customers Adopt Technology. Parsu has conducted dozens of executive seminars on service quality, customer satisfaction and the role of technology in service delivery in many countries.

Aruna Sundararajan
Aruna Sundararajan is theCEO, Community Service Centres, Infrastructure Leasing & Financial Services (IL&FS Ltd), where she is heading the national rural Common Service Centre project under the National E-Government Programme to provide e-services through a network of kiosks. An IAS officer, Sundararajan has held key administrative posts with the Union and Federal Governments in India. Over the last decade, Sundararajan has been working in the area of Digital Inclusion and Access for the underserved, where she has pioneered several innovative e-governance, livelihoods and empowerment initiatives including Kerala’s acclaimed Digital literacy and Rajasthan’s financial access initiatives. She has also worked extensively on developing innovative and cost effective models for enhanced Digital Access and Services.

Dr Guruduth Banavar
Dr Guruduth Banavar is Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of the Global Public Sector in IBM. In this role, he is responsible for providing technical leadership across the Public Sector, with a particular focus on IBM’s Smarter Cities initiatives to capture strategic opportunities, improve upon solutions, harvest core assets, and maintain a vital link to IBM Research. Previously, Dr Banavar was the Director of IBM Research in India, one of eight labs of the worldleading IBM Research Division. He was responsible for establishing India as a pre-eminent research lab in the areas of services research and mobile computing. He also created the Bangalore branch of IBM Research as well as a Collaboratory with the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad. In his additional role as Chief Technologist (CTO) of IBM India / South Asia, Banavar led the creation of a technical leadership group, a regional technical strategy, and sales enablers aligned with the business objectives. He served as the external face and spokesperson for IBM’s technology leadership in India.

Earlier, Dr Banavar worked for 10 years at IBM’s Thomas J Watson Research Center in New York, which he joined in 1995 after his PhD. His broad technical interests and contributions have been in Service Science, Pervasive Computing, Distributed Systems, and Programming Models. Banavar has published more than 40 research papers in top international forums, invented more than 25 US patents, chaired major international technical conferences and workshops in his research areas, and served on PhD committees in major US universities.