CXO 50 Awards and Conclave: Honouring IT Excellence

CXO Insight Middle East held the fourth edition of CXO 50 Awards and Conclave at Conrad Hotel, Dubai, celebrating IT leaders who have embraced innovation and technology to define their organisation’s path to the digital era.

Sponsored by Gold Partners: Trellix, Fortinet, Proven Consult, Cohesity, NetApp, Lenovo and Silver Partners: Finesse, D-Link, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, Epicor, Visiontech Systems, Cloud Box Technologies, Teksalah, BSI, Checkmarx, SolarWinds, Help AG, Logicom and Virsec – the CXO 50 Awards was a huge success, with over 100 attendees.

The show began with MC Basil Ayass, a technology industry veteran, introducing the day’s proceedings, which included a half-day conference, featuring keynote addresses and panel discussion.  

Jayakumar Mohanachandran, Group CIO, Easa Saleh Al Gurg, gave the keynote address on ‘Technology leadership in the changing world’. Mohanachandran elaborated on how the role of a CIO is evolving in today’s digital world and why it must be more about driving strategy, innovation and revenues.

Following Mohanachandran’s thought-provoking presentation, Terence Sathyanarayan, MD, Pulse Innovations Systems, shared insights on why CIOs need to evolve as chief transformation strategists to leverage digital opportunities. 

Next up was the insightful panel discussion, where panel members delved into the key technologies that will take precedence in 2022. Moderated by Jeevan Thankappan, Managing Editor at Insight Media and Publishing and CXO Insight Middle East, the panel featured Mohanachandran; Gregg Petersen, Regional Director Middle East & Africa, Cohesity; Vishal Manchanda, Regional Business Development Director, Proven Consult and Vibin Shaju, Presales Director, Trellix.

Throughout the discussions, the expert panel took a deep dive into the current challenges faced by business and IT leaders, technology trends and why it is imperative to have a cloud digital first strategy. Manchanda shed light on how CIOs can navigate the complex post-pandemic business landscape and why it is vital for them to balance innovation and execution. Acknowledging the same trends, Petersen elaborated on how organisations can derive more value from their data and ways CIOs can continuously drive innovation. Meanwhile, Shaju shared insights into the driving factors behind increasing focus and investments on securing digital transformation initiatives, emphasising that more must be done to always try and stay ahead of the perpetrators, especially as the increasing move to flexible workforce is expanding attack surfaces.

The panellists were in consensus that the key technologies that will shape 2022 will be AI, more advanced use cases on cloud, cybersecurity, and analytics among several others.

The high-profile event concluded with the awards ceremony, where an exclusive set of 50 individuals were handpicked by CXO Insight Middle East’s esteemed judging panel featuring Arun Tewary, VP-IT, Emirates Flight Catering; Jassim Haji, President, Artificial Intelligence Society of Bahrain and Sebastian Samuel, CIO, AW Rostamani.

See below for the complete list of CXO 50 Awards 2022 winners: