In Panorama: Zyxware at DrupalCon Asia 2016
DrupalCon Asia: A significant moment in the history of Drupal
Mumbai was surely on cloud nine, with DrupalCon Asia painting the city red in waves of excitement, diversity, and sheer vibrance. The three-day event, held from February 18-21, 2016, in IIT-Bombay, featured high-value summits, interactive knowledge sharing sessions, Birds of a Feather (BOFs) sessions, high-calibre presentations, workshops, training, and week-long code-sprints.
Held in Asia for the first time, the event garnered a lot of enthusiasm and interest, with a very powerful international presence, with attendees from 32 countries taking part in it. Yet another surprising fact is that 840 of the 1025 attendees were first-timers at the DrupalCon. For the Indian Drupal community, DrupalCon Asia provided a fabulous opportunity to connect with their global counterparts. Dries Buytaert, Founder and lead developer of Drupal CMS, delivered the keynote address at the function, that focused on the latest updates on Drupal and the Drupal community.
Zyxware participates in DrupalCon Asia 2016, sponsor for DrupalGov Summit
Zyxware Technologies is honoured to be a participant in DrupalCon Asia 2016. Mr. Thomas P. Thomas, CEO, Zyxware Technologies; Mr. Anoop Ashok, Manager – Business Development; and Mr. Vimal Joseph, Senior Manager, Technology, represented the company at the event. Zyxware was also the sponsor for the DrupalGov or Drupal Government Summit held as part of the event.
About DrupalGov
The DrupalGov summit was organised with the active participation and support of the Open Source Consortium of India (OSCI), IIT Bombay, and the Drupal Association. The conference brought together the key stakeholders from the Indian government, consulting organisations, and technology experts from India, UK, Australia, and the EU, to discuss how Drupal could be powerful enabler for the success of the Digital India initiative. The summit also focused on discussions on the challenges confronted by Open-source projects in the public sector and involved Panel discussions, expert presentations, Discussion groups and Networking breaks.
Apart from high-profile speakers from Australia and the UK, the conference was attended by top-level representatives of DeitY, Ministry of IT, Government of India; leading representatives from Government of Himachal Pradesh; representatives from academia, IIT Bombay, and high-ranking members of NIC, Open Technology Centre. The key panelists at the summit included Jeffrey A. “jam” McGuire, Open Source Evangelist at Acquia; Natalie Taylor, Sr Manager for Digital Transformation at London's City Hall, UK; and Christopher Skene, Co-architect of aGov, Australia.
At the panel discussions: Sharing perspectives on Digital transformation in India
Mr. Thomas P. Thomas, CEO, Zyxware Technologies, participated in the third panel discussion on “How and where can Drupal and its community be best deployed, using these tactics, to solve the challenges in Digital Transformation in India?" held as part of the DrupalGov Summit.
Venkatesh Hariharan; Open Innovation Network, OSS Evangelist and OSCI co-founder, started the panel discussions by outlining the criticality of the following policies – Open Standards, Open Source Policy, Open Data Policy, Source Open Policy and Open APIs - for a successful Digital Transformation initiative in India. The panel discussions mainly focused on the various challenges that need to be addressed in implementing these policies. As part of creating a larger pool of Drupal programmers, a professor from IIT Bombay offered the possibility of using Spoken Tutorial platform as a means to introduce Drupal to new learners. Zyxware Technologies agreed to share its training curriculum to enable Spoken Tutorial to set up a course on Drupal in Spoken Tutorial.
Drupal & eCommerce: Zyxware presents case study session on Drupal project
On Day 3, Vimal Joseph, Senior Manager, Technology, presented a 20- minutes case study session on 'Scalable cloud based e-commerce platform on Drupal with a common back office for managing sales of entry passes to multiple events'. In this informative session, he explained the choice of Drupal as a platform for e-commerce and how it helped to achieve the client's objective, the challenges faced during the execution of the project and how it was resolved, the takeaways, and contributions on the line as part of this project. The session was well-received and generated great enthusiasm among the audience.
