CXO Insight ME Honours Transformational Tech Leaders

The second edition of CXO 50 Awards celebrated the successes of regional technology visionaries from across different verticals and featured a half-day conference with interesting keynote sessions and an engaging panel discussion.

The show kicked off with the MC, Basil Ayass, a technology industry veteran, introducing the day’s proceedings. Jeevan Thankappan, Managing Editor at Insight Media and Publishing and CXO Insight Middle East, gave the welcome address and explained the process of the awards, which involved an external judging panel. The esteemed judges, Ajay Rathi, CIO, Dubai Healthcare City; Jassim Haji, President, Aritificial Intelligence, Society of Bahrain; Sebastian Samuel, CIO, AW Rostamani and Sreedhar Reddy, Director-Digital Transformation, Aldar Properties, went through over 100 nominations to select the final winners.

Sebastian Samuel, CIO, AW Rostamani, presented a keynote session on ‘Navigating the geography of change’. He shared insights on how to have meaningful conversations in the business world.

He said, “Master the art of changing your mind – instead of focusing on protecting your point, become curious about the insights the other person had, which led him to share his thoughts.”

The next keynote presentation was from Jayakumar Mohanachandran, CIO, Precision Group, who focused on ‘Strategy beyond technology’. He encouraged everyone in the room to establish human connections in a better fashion.

This was followed by Nutanix Regional Sales Manager Ahmed Mostageer’s talk on ‘Why hybrid cloud for modern data centre’.

Moderated by Insight Media’s Thankappan, the panel discussion on ‘Disruptive technologies and their impact on Middle East Businesses’ featured industry stalwarts such as Aaron White, Regional Sales Director-METI, Nutanix; Ayman Mohammad, Major Accounts Manager, Fortinet; Kimmo Bergius, CTO, Sulava and Feras Hani, System Engineer, Middle East, CommScope.

The panel discussed importance of digital transformation and challenges around it, how to focus on innovation during the process, the role cloud and security technologies play and how players can innovate their data centres to be successful in the digital age. The panellists also shared best practices and insights from their experiences in the region.

The event concluded with the awards ceremony, where an elite set of individuals who have spearheaded innovative and transformative projects in the region, were commended for their drive and forward-thinking. The Awards recognised IT leaders who are driving digital transformation with best practices, new methodologies and right technology resources.

The CXO event was sponsored by Gold Partners – Micro Focus, Fortinet, Nutanix, CommScope, Sulava, Help AG and Silver Partners – Check Point, Exclusive Networks, Finesse, Teksalah, ThreatQuotient, SANS EMEA, Western Digital, VisionTech and Huawei.

See below for the complete list of CXO 50 Award winners: