Sky is the limit: IT geniuses from Pune honoured

As an effort to recognise outstanding contribution in the field of information technology (IT) from Pune, five IT professionals and entrepreneurs were felicitated at the ‘Sarathi-IT Awards 2012’, held on August 17 at SM Joshi Hall in the city.

In commemoration of country’s former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, whose vision was to see IT playing a key role in India’s progress and to mark his birthday on August 20, city-based NGO Sarathi has been felicitating achievers and contributors in the IT industry from the city since 2005.

This year, the Sarathi-IT award winners are Biren Dharamsi (CEO and director, Sum Concepts Technologies), Mahesh Kulkarni (co-founder and MD, AFour Technologies), Rakesh Jain (CEO and founder member, Paysquare), Shailendra Abhyankar (senior vice-president, SunGard Global Solution Centre) and Shashishekhar Rege (general manager, Vodafone). The five awardees shared their experiences with the students on how they grew and succeeded in their careers.

The chief guests for the occasion were PC Shejwalkar (former dean, faculty of management, University of Pune), Shekhar Potnis (COO, Infosys) and Deepak Shikarpur (chairman, IT committee, MCCIA).

Speaking on the occasion, Shejwalkar insisted that students must have a vision and act on it to make it true. Though it is important to be well-versed in English, he stressed, “Marathi as a language must not be only restricted to knowing it, but must be made a language of knowledge. There should be more books on computer, management and engineering in Marathi.”

Shikarpur inspired the students by telling them about the golden opportunity in regional language computing. “Over 80% of India’s population does not speak English but uses a cellphone. Therefore, ancillary development in IT to serve this populace will play a big role.”

In countries like Brazil, China and India, Potnis said, factors like changing demographics, the generation-X and emerging economies, will force business to transform, according to Shikarpur. As part of counselling, Sarathi regularly conducts workshops for fresh graduates to help them kick-start their careers. Sarathi has also been helping the youth by making them aware of various options available and the skill sets required.

What is Sarathi?
Entrepreneur Shankar Kalmani is the one who started NGO Sarathi, a non-funded and non-profitable organisation fighting for social cause and creating better alternatives for today’s youth. Its mission is to make positive and quantifiable difference by maximising employability of rural youth in Maharashtra, especially in the IT field.

Biren Dharamsi, CEO and director, Sum Concepts Technologies
A short meeting with scientist Abdul Kalam gave birth to Dharamsi’s vision, which is to provide technology-led quality education at affordable costs to the masses. In just two years, his company Sum Concepts has set-up over 1,000 e-Learning classrooms across Maharashtra at as low as Rs10 per student, per month, benefiting over 5 lakh students and 4,000 teachers.

Mahesh Kulkarni, co-founder and MD, AFour Technologies
A software engineer with an experience of over 13 years, Kulkarni has a rich experience of test-life-cycles of various software systems across domains around the globe. He is a leader who has built great professional teams who are specialised in performance testing, test automation, security testing and functional testing at Pune, Bangalore and Hyderabad.

Rakesh Jain, CEO, Paysquare
With his experience and vision, Rakesh Jain has developed Paysquare as one of the preferred destinations for payroll outsourcing. With the right investments in technology and advocating a strong process centric culture, he has been able to grow Paysquare’s client base to over 225 satisfied customers, catering to the requirements of a wide variety of organisations and employee categories.

Shailendra Abhyankar, senior VP, SunGard Global Solution Centre
He led a multicultural and multilingual team of over 400 employees belonging to 30 different nationalities. He is one of the leaders who led a company with annual revenue of about $4.5 billion. SunGard is the largest privately held software and services company and was ranked 434 on the Fortune 500 list in 2011.

Shashishekhar Rege, GM, Vodafone
With over 20 years of IT experience in various facets of delivery management, Shashishekhar Rege is a telecom domain specialist as he has been working with the best telecom brands in Europe. Currently, he is initiating efforts to establish and stabilise IT Quality Assurance centre of excellence for Vodafone India IT. His charter includes defining quality assurance and quality control frameworks, set up a dedicated team for the same and ensure this function acts as final quality gate for all IT deliveries. He has set a target for his team to effectively replace the end users of Vodafone’s IT applications during user acceptance tests and optimise organisation’s IT delivery investments.