Moderator
VINOD AGGARWAL
Vinnie Aggarwal is a professor in the Department of Political Science and the Haas School of Business and Director of the Berkeley Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation Study Center (BASC) at the University of California at Berkeley.  He serves as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Business and Politics. He received his B.A. from the University of Michigan and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Stanford University.  Dr. Aggarwal consults regularly with multinational corporations on strategic planning and trade policy. He has published 14 books and over 70 articles. His most recent book is Bilateral Trade Agreements in the Asia Pacific. Email: vinod@berkeley.edu.

SAM BALAJI
Sam Balaji is a Principal with Deloitte Consulting LLP, the US presence of the global Deloitte Consulting organization, which is one of four functional areas within the $20 billion multi-disciplinary firm of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu.  He is currently the West Coast Regional Leader of the Technology Integration practice and also serves as the Vice-Chairman of Deloitte Consulting India Private Limited. He is based in San Jose, CA.

His specialty is in the area of large complex business transformations involving Web enablement, CRM and ERP systems. Over the years, he has also developed and executed delivery models using differentiated techniques involving a combination of managed services, distributed development, and offshoring.

Previously, Mr. Balaji was the Managing Partner in-charge of all of the Deloitte US entities based in Hyderabad, India where he was responsible for strategy formulation and execution for client service and business operations activities.

Mr. Balaji has led several significant strategy, business transformation initiatives for key clients in the Technology, Media and Telcom and Manufacturing industries. Additionally, he has also held several Global and US Practice Leadership roles and has been the Executive Sponsor of several key vendor alliances.

His client list includes several large High Tech, Telecom, Media and Manufacturing companies: Agilent, Applied Materials, AT&T, Comcast, Bell Canada, Broadwing, Chrysler, DIRECTV, Ford, HP, IBM, MCI, Nextel, GM, OnStar, Oracle, SBC, several CLECS, SWIFT, Telstra, TELUS, T-Mobile, Unisys, Verizon, and Vodafone, and a few US state and local governments.

Over the years Mr. Balaji has been a speaker in the media, internal and external events and has also published in trade journals. Examples include: the BBC, National Foreign Trade Council, NASSCOM, Silicon India, Billing World, Networld, PC Expo, Distributed Enterprise Computing, Data Management Review, Imaging World, etc.

Mr. Balaji holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Science and can be reached at sbalaji@deloitte.com.

ANDY BLOCH
Andrew has been with Accenture 21 years and was one of the founders of their outsourcing practice in the United States.  He has held a variety of outsourcing management positions from local to global.  During the last three (3) years Andrew has been Accenture’s Global Outsourcing Delivery Director for their Communications and High Tech industry vertical.  In that role he supervised $2B of annual revenue and had clients and employees in all geographies.  His clients have ranged from large telecommunications companies to device manufacturers and software developers.

Although Andrew permanently resides in San Francisco, he has temporarily relocated to many cities throughout his career.  Most recently he relocated to Tokyo to start up Accenture’s outsourcing practice in Japan and was instrumental in jump starting a new development center in Dalian, China.

Beginning January 1st of this year, Andrew has a new role.  He is now responsible for a large outsourcing portfolio in North America that is “cross industry.”  As such, his clients are now exclusively from North America but his employees providing services are located throughout the world.  His clients range from software manufacturers like Microsoft, HP, BEA and others, to banks, hospitals and state governmental agencies.

 

 

RITESH IDNANI
Ritesh joined Infosys BPO in November 2005 and heads the global sales organization. He was previously head of sales for the banking and capital markets vertical at Infosys Technologies, their largest business unit. Prior to that Ritesh was with PricewaterhouseCoopers where he set up the financial services risk management practice in India, and before that with Citigroup in corporate and investment banking.

At Infosys BPO, Ritesh is responsible for building and executing go-to-market strategies. He also oversees the strategic business objectives of the company including new opportunities identification, market-led solutions development and monetization, sales strategy and customer relationship management. He has nearly a decade of experience in assisting global corporations choose processes to outsource, implement governance models and manage and drive the performance of their outsourcing relationships. Ritesh has a bachelor’s degree in commerce from Narsee Monjee College of Commerce and Economics in Mumbai and an MBA from the Faculty of Management Studies, Delhi.

 

 

VIVEK MANSINGH

As a Country Manager for Dell India R & D Center Vivek spearheads a 600 member engineering organization in Bangalore. He leads a highly-talented team of software/hardware professionals in developing Dell’s award-winning portfolio of products. Vivek brings to Dell a wealth of more than 20 years of industry experience, heading companies like Portal Software and Ishoni Networks in India and holding senior positions in Fijutsu and HP in the USA.

Vivek was founder and executive vice president of ATTI, a subsidiary of Aavid, which was listed in Fortune magazine as one of the 100 fastest growing companies in USA for 1999. He was listed as an honored professional in “National Who’s Who for the United States” in the year 2000. Vivek holds six US patents and has published more than 85 technical papers in various scientific and trade publications. He has also authored a chapter in a Handbook of Microelectronics, published by McGraw Hill. He is highly sought after for speaking and teaching engagements by MNCs. Vivek is also a member of the Board of Governors at the National Institute of Technology, Allahabad, India. He graduated with a Ph.D. and a M.S. in ME from Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada. Vivek was awarded the Gold Medal for graduating at the top of his class of Mechanical Engineering from The Regional Engineering College, Allahabad, India.