I just came back from the Inspire 2018. The event was very well organized by ValueLabs and hosted at The Dorchester in London, UK. The venue was absolutely perfect for this, indeed, inspiring event. Over one and half days there were several very good talks and plenty of possibilities to connect with peers from all over Europe. For me it was very interesting to discuss the challenges, needs and differences in IT Outsourcing. Especially when working with pure Indian players like ValueLabs. I had hardly heard of ValueLabs before. Thus, I was eager to know more about the company and its values.
The Importance of Trust in a Partnership
As Arjun Rao, the CEO and Founder of ValueLabs, started his speech, I was expecting the usual marketing with huge growth in turnover and employees to impress potential new clients. I was positively surprised, that Arjun did nothing alike. Instead, he focused on the values of the company. The values are wide-spread and I do not want to go into detail. However, one value really got me. Arjun outlined the importance of a trust-based partnership and that trust should be there from the beginning. As this is matching exactly the leadership philosophy I believe in, I was very happy to hear that.
The Container Analogy – again!
One of the other speakers was Jasbir Patel, the CEO of Snapfish. Once again it was interesting to see the difference of Indian and American speakers and leaders. Both were great speakers, but both in completely different ways. I liked Jasbir’s speech, too. Although it did not get through to me on an emotional level. This changed with Sangeet Choudary, a bestselling author. First of all, Sangeet is a great speaker! He talked about platforms, what they are, how they evolved and where they might go to. In order to do that, he used the exact same real-life container analogy, I had used in one of my earlier posts about Docker. How could I not like that?
Going into the Details
Apart from the CEO and different guest speakers, the stage was open to several ValueLabs employees, too. In various presentations, very knowledgeable colleagues explained, what they are working on. Some of it was new to me, like the differentiation between customer experience (CX) and user experience (UX). Some of it I already knew, like what does good architecture mean in real life. At that point, I would have preferred to have two or three separate, but more detailed tracks. The topics that were covered, were partially really complex. Hence, compressing them in 15-20 minutes was a challenge.