NEW DELHI
FEBRUARY 12, 2007

Cisco conducted a two-day annual partner summit at Agra on 9th and 10th February 2007. And besides the usual technical sessions addressed by the company's think tanks on the first day, the excitement came at the post-lunch session on second day. Though it rained heavily in Agra, the atmosphere within the conference hall was very hot. This was because of the final rounds of the Cisco Mastermind Quiz 2007.

The quiz had four rounds with Netsol leading till the second round, followed by Datacraft and Wipro Infotech. But round three, which was Bollywood category, brought Datacraft and Netsol at par. There were four tiebreaker questions between the two, since both were thorough in Cisco's advanced technology. The questions got over in that category and so the next category they moved on to was Bollywood.

Netsol chose Aishwarya Rai but answered only one question correctly adding just five points to their scores, whereas Datacraft chose Sanjay Dutt, and answered two questions declaring them as the winners. Gaurav Kapoor of Channel V, who was anchoring the quiz quipped, “Never in my life I have seen the tiebreaker round stretching almost equal to the entire quiz.”

Each of the two-members of the second Runner up team (Wipro Infotech) and First Runner up (Netsol) were given two Tata Sky connections with 1-year subscription absolutely free and two Camcorders respectively. The winners also got a trip for two to any South East Asian country.

The winners, Amit Bansal and Manish Khanijo of Datacraft admitted that they took the whole quiz seriously and had done lot of homework on the technology side. Amit said, “Since we won the online phase we were keeping ourselves updated on the technology front on a daily basis. But, we were caught off guard a bit on when it came to movies.”

For Manish, the final winning experience was the icing on the cake, as he was enjoying since the elimination round, rather than slugging it over books. “The case study part was very exciting as we got it just a day in advance. We studied the whole night and built on the secured solutions for it. We did not have much idea on storage or few other solutions,” he said.

Though Manish was reluctant to choose Sanjay Dutt as he had not seen Lage Raho Munnabhai, Amit chose him because he had heard the movies advertisements and promos on the radio while commuting to the office.

When asked why there was no team from East in the finals, Avinash Purwar, Regional Manager - Channels informed that the competition was open online and did not restrict anybody's participation. In fact the participation happened from Sri Lanka and Bangladesh as well, but nobody was able to make it to the finals.

Talking about the Cisco Channel Summit, Purwar noted, “Around 140 partner companies joined the summit. But the total number of people is 330 because there are two to three people attending from the same company.”

Parag Arora, Business Manager – Advanced Technologies, Channels - India and SAARC Region, Cisco Systems India informed that the motive behind the summit was to discuss business investment and planning for the coming year and to reward and award the partners based on their last one-year performance. The quiz competition has been a part of the summit for the past five years.

Elaborating on the quiz competition Parag said, “This time we broke the regional round into two. We introduced online competition on 18th January, 2007 as the first phase to increase the participation from the partners across India followed by three winners from North (Delhi), South (Bangalore) and West (Mumbai) giving presentation on the case studies based on the real life customer experience, we gave them.” The case study round happened on 31st January 2007.

A panel of three judges, one from Business, Pre Sales and Consulting divisions of Cisco chose the winners for the Case study round. The winners were decided on the basis of how well they understood the customer problem, what solution they designed and the quality of presentation they delivered.

In the meanwhile, the winners, Manish and Amit are still to decide which country they want to go to as part of their spoils. And both admit that their respective better halves will have the final say about this.

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