Veritas Illuminate 2022 took place last week between 21 and 23 March. The enthusiasm of getting a chance to interact with colleagues in person was evident with the turnout of 600-plus employees across the three-day span. While talking about Illuminate 2022 in his blog, Sr Director Anand Kekre said that ‘no technology conference is complete without a hackathon.’ I could not agree more. For me, the hackathon has always been one of my favourite parts of the Illuminate tech conference. The germination of ideas into working prototypes, which eventually lead to products, reflects the true DNA of Veritas. Internal employees and external talent have always associated Veritas Pune with being a center of excellence for innovation, and this is exactly what the hackathon has achieved. Every year, employees in Pune come together to demonstrate their innovation as a precursor to Veritas Illuminate.
This year participants could choose to either come up with a new product/feature (NPF) or work on operation and support efficiency (OSE) as the two categories for the hackathon. We also had themes including simplicity/automation, cloud/containers, analytics, security/ransomware, and performance.
We need innovation in each aspect of our business. Product innovation alone does not drive the success of a world-class organization. The hackathon that took place between 10 and 13 March involved cross-functional teams that demonstrated that the innovation bug does not affect the engineering audience. We saw participation from 75 teams, 425 participants, and 136 ideas prototyped. Another change this year was the hybrid model which was well-received by all participants and attendees of Illuminate as well as the hackathon. The first-panel discussion that I participated in this year had folks sitting across the room from me as well as 400+ remote attendees.
Throughout my experience at Veritas, I have seen very creative and business-relevant ideas cropping up from various corners. Many engineers have these ideas at the back of their minds but are not able to focus on them and build working prototypes. The hackathon creates an ambience of quick prototyping that motivates employees to spark ideation. Over the years, I have seen multiple top-notch ideas, resulting in product-level features coming out of hackathons.
While hackathon is a huge part of Illuminate, it is also accompanied by a series of knowledge-sharing sessions, contests, competitions, panel discussions, and so much more. Employees from various departments come together for these exchanges, providing everyone with various perspectives. I firmly believe that ideas come from a combination of insights and interactions.
Getting good insights and communicating these insights to subject matter experts is a recipe for powerful ideas. Illuminate is a great platform for bringing in information from a variety of sources and exchanging it with a larger group of employees. The difficulties or prospects that customers want us to solve become apparent as individuals absorb this information. As engineers, we are hard-wired to solve problems, and the hardest part is defining them. You have won half the battle once you define a problem, and Illuminate helps do just that.
As we recover from the pandemic, we anticipate more employees will visit the workplace and communicate with their peers, sparking new ideas and pushing up Veritas’ curve of innovation. I can barely wait to see the results of the innovation coming out of #VeritasIlluminate 2022. If innovating excites you, be a part of #TeamVtas by visiting our careers page.
