Techies divided over rebranding of Park

Thiruvananthapuram: After being known as Technopark Kerala for a while, the IT park has rebranded it as ‘Technopark Thiruvananthapuram’, giving it a local flavor. The rebranding assumes significance in the wake of efforts launched recently to woo various global brands to set up offices here.
When it became operational in 1994, the registered name of Technopark was ‘Electronics Technology Parks-Kerala’.The IT park began to be called Technopark Trivandrum from 2007 before changing its name to Technopark Kerala in 2015. The recent rebranding to Technopark Thiruvananthapuram, though was done as a quiet affair, triggered a lot of discussions among IT community.
While a section of the IT community hails it as the much-needed move as it is the right time for destination marketing, the other section feels it as narrowing down of larger goals and founding vision.
“Now all knowledge industries are city-centric. Take any IT park in the country. All of them are known for the cities such as Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Pune or Mumbai. Let there be a healthy competition between IT parks within the state,” said Robin Alex Panicker, founder of a software firm Finotes.
M Vasudevan, who was retired as senior manager of business development at Technopark, begs to differ. “Technopark is now an internationally renowned strong brand and I do not believe that we need to rebrand it. I believe Thiruvananthapuram has reached a stage of being one of the top IT cities in India,” he said.
“It was Mudra Communications which initially helped Technopark to brand it as the world’s greenest IT park. Again in 2002 Mudra was reappointed as the agency who rebranded it as ‘Technopark- harmony at work’. There was also a proposal in 2000 to bring in private investment into Technopark by offering Technopark’s assets to private companies and Mahindra Park has shown great interest but somehow did not materialize. From 2011, the government decided to have Kerala IT as a single brand and in 2015 Technopark came up with rebranding as Technopark Kerala. Technopark was always using Technopark Trivandrum since 2007 after Infopark started marketing as Infopark Kochi,” Vasudevan said.
IT secretary M Sivasankar refused to comment on the topic. However, in a response to the Facebook post of Vasudevan, he wrote that it was unfortunate to look IT development in regional perspectives. “Right now, Kerala has a great opportunity to grab the center stage in IT. Technopark is already an established brand. It really needs no rebranding with the place name,” he wrote.