A Guest lecture on “ Current trends in the IT industry – Knowledge Gap” was conducted on
22.07.2017 at KPR Institute of Engineering and Technology campus. This was a conducted as part of the Career Support Series (CSS)initiative of KPR Institute of Engineering and Technology. The guest lecturers were entrepreneurs from the IT industry with more than 15 years of experience in various companies in the USA and India.
Mr. Vevek Pandian, CEO of M/s Thought bees Technologies Pvt Ltd., an organization head quartered in Christchurch, Newzeland and having its offshore centre at Coimbatore. Vevek received his Bachelors Degree from BITS, Pilani, and holds a Masters Degree in Computer Science from the University of Texas, United States. Presently Vevek is involved in the design and development of high-performance, scalable, cloud-native mobile apps. He worked as a Senior Engineer for Honeywell Corporation until 2007 when he returned to University of a Texas as a full time graduate student. Vevek spent three years leading projects at Morningstar Incorporation,Chicago. He was solely responsible for managing team of architects, developers and designers to create the next generation of Morningstar Document Research products used by professionalresearches in the investment industry.
Vevek returned to India and started to work for Pramati Technologies, a Middleware Platform pioneer before venturing out as an entrepreneur with Thought bees. Urmila Murali is the COO of M/s Thought bees Techonologies Pvt Ltd., She is an engineer from Tamil Nadu College of Engineering, Coimabtore. She got into the Indian Airforce, only the second batch of women in the IAF, in the Technical branch. During her 6 years stint with the IAF, she was responsible for operation and maintenance of a high tech communication system. Being an adventurous person she has several para jumps to her credit, has flown in fighter trainer aircraft and Floater helicopter. She was an active participant as ground support during the Kargil war. She now handles the operations of Thoughtbees.
The session was a very interactive and informative one where the current industry trends was shared precisely with details of the direction in which technology was moving towards. Emphasis was given on what and how the students need to prepare themselves for the industry. There was very good interaction by the students with many questions. These were clearly answered by Vevek during the Q&A session. Urmila shared the finer points of how to prepare oneself in terms of personal qualities and values. She spoke about how to discipline oneself for the career ahead. Overall a very useful session for the III year students with many take away from it. Apart from this M/s Thoughtbees have shown interest in an incubation setup within college and also are open for a session on technology trends for the faculty, joint projects for students and internship based incubation centre. Mr. Vevek has shared his contact details with the students and has invited them to contact him any support he could help with. Vevek and Urmila met and had a discussion with the HoD of the Department of Computer Science, Vishnu Kumar and left options open for faculty meet, projects and other areas where they could help our students.