Illuminate 2024 ignites the imagination at Veritas Pune

Illuminate, Veritas Pune’s flagship annual technology festival, concluded with a bang yesterday. The three-day conference that took place on 19, 20, and 21 March was the culmination of a series of events that kicked off in January 2024.

This year, I got opportunity to lead the organizing team for illuminate and, I’m truly humbled. I feel like I am standing on the shoulders of giants. From Cutting Edge in the past to illuminate now, the event has just grown bigger and better over two decades thanks to all the wonderful and excellent leaders at the helm.

While ideation is the center of innovation, there is so much more that defines. It starts from understanding the problem to be solved, building the solution to then taking the solution to market.

<pictorial representation> Ignited Imagination -> Idea-> Execution-> Solution to a problem / need

This, in a nutshell, is what illuminate focuses on. Multiple tracks over 3 months that systematically ignited the imagination in all aspects of an idea’s innovation journey.

• TechColosseum kicked of illuminate in January, igniting the imagination to generate ideas. This series of weekly sessions and panel discussions brought together experts from different fields to develop enhanced awareness and understanding of the emerging landscape, business challenges, and technological trends.

• Ideas need time, focus, and teams to be worked upon, prototyped, and developed. Hackathon did exactly that. With ~700 individuals from all functions passionate to demonstrate ideas for new features as well as operational excellence, it was evident why Veritas leads the market with innovation.

• Technical Paper Presentation showcased the depth of research that goes in bringing out inventive and market-leading ideas.

• Ideas need not only time, but also resources, and to get those they must compete with other ideas. That’s why illuminate had the Elevator Pitch track a platform to demonstrate creative communication.

• Ideas need solid implementation for success and implementation needs strong skills. The Tech Tutorials track had workshops on the top two transformational and critical business needs – Gen AI and Cyber Security.

• A great idea, successfully implemented, and resulting in a great solution is effective only when it is easy to understand and use. Tech Hub provided an opportunity for engineers to talk about Veritas solutions in the form of blogs, white papers, and videos.

• Finally, the Product Expo and Technical Demos were great means to showcase the latest innovations going out from Veritas.

In addition to taking innovation to the next level by focusing on the whole system, illuminate also celebrated Veritas’ belief in inclusiveness. A pan-India student hackathon saw close to 900 university students coming together to work on their ideas with selected teams visiting the Veritas office for the final round. This year Illuminate also launched a new track – Illuminate University - where underprivileged students visited the Veritas office and attended sessions and workshops on Cloud Computing and Data Analytics.

While innovation is the core of illuminate, the key ingredient in making this happen is teamwork and collaboration. We first started working on illuminate 2024 way back in November of last year by putting together the team to drive it. What a team it has been! Passionate, energetic and of course innovative – truly demonstrating the DNA of Veritas. I have been fortunate to work with this team where each team member and volunteer has single-mindedly focused on making sure that we keep raising the bar for illuminate.