In a departure from its past, corporate India’s prestigious ‘Dataquest IT Person of the Year’ award 2009 was presented to a group of persons, not an individual: it was presented to the Government-appointed Board of Satyam led by Mr. Kiran Karnik for its rapid action in averting the largest disaster in the history of corporate India, on Thursday night.

In the 17-year history of Dataquest awards, the receiver has been an individual. Satyam’s board members include Messers Deepak Parekh, C Achutan, Tarun Das, TN Manoharan and Suryakant Balkrishna Mainak, with Kiran Karnik as chairman

Mr. Lakshmi Narayanan, Vice Chairman of Cognizant Technology Solutions and the winner of 2008 ‘Dataquest IT Person of the Year’ award and Mr. Pradeep Gupta Dataquest publisher and CyberMedia chairman, presented the award to Mr. Karnik in a glittering ceremony in the presence of leaders from all sections of the IT industry.

Speaking on the occasion, Mr. Pradeep Gupta, Chairman of CyberMedia said, “The industry is happy to leave 2008-09 behind. It was a year of turmoil, global downturn, slowdown in the Indian market and the Satyam saga. The biggest surprise to us was the slowdown in the domestic market, compared with the continued growth in services exports.”

The Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Mr. Azim Premji, founder of Wipro and the Pathbreaker of the Year award was presented to Mr. Arvind Rao of OnMobile. Thirteen other awards were presented to category leaders.

The jury felt that the Satyam episode could have condemned its large workforce to an uncertain future and tarnished the image of the Indian IT industry, but for the Ministry of Corporate Affairs constituting a board to oversee the Satyam affairs and the stellar role played by the board.

The Satyam board embarked on an immediate damage control mission--meeting most global customers, convincing them to stay on board, ensuring timely payment of salaries, devising a 'virtual pool' to support the large number of workforce already on the bench, collecting financial receivables to sustain itself till it found a new owner, finding for Satyam a new and respectable owner through a fair and transparent bidding process; and finally successfully creating a new model of corporate governance in India.

The Lifetime Achievement Award for Wipro founder Mr. Azim Premji
The Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Chairman of Wipro Corp Mr. Azim Premji, whose vision and perseverance helped sculpt the Indian IT industry. He asked the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore to work out design options for a computer that Wipro could manufacture and decided to go along with IISc’s recommendation to build Intel's 16-bit 8086 architecture, when others were still toying with 8-bit systems. The rest is history.

Another first from Wipro was the Lab-on-Hire concept that allowed technology companies like Intel, Sun, Motorola and Cisco to use the services of Indian engineers--something that in later years would become the big wave of offshore outsourcing.

Be it getting into infrastructure management or BPO, under the vision of Mr. Premji, Wipro always remained focused on identifying new areas and getting into them quickly. While firmly establishing the company as a leading IT services firm globally, Wipro focused on the Indian market to emerge as one of the top services firms in the domestic market across all user segments.

Mr. Premji invested significant personal time, money and energy to close the gap in India's primary education, through the Azim Premji foundation.

‘Pathbreaker of the Year 2009’ Award for Arvind Rao
Mr. Arvind Rao, Chairman, CEO & Co-founder, OnMobile was awarded the ‘Pathbreaker of the Year 2009’ award in recognition of his contribution in the field of telecom and infotech, in creating the biggest telecom VAS company in India.

The company has done innovative work in voice portals and grew both organically, and inorganically. Focused under the leadership of Mr. Rao the company created, retained and maintained a great team and achieved global scale, touching a billion consumers worldwide, and breaking a path for others to follow.

Today, OnMobile's services touch a billion customers through global brands like Orange, AT&T, France Telecom, T-Mobile, Wanadoo, Turkcell in 30 markets, competing successfully with much larger MNC companies. It has been at the center of India's mobile VAS industry that has grown to Rs. 10,000 crore today with innovative products, business models, technology and partnerships.

In addition, thirteen awards were given to the top manufacturers and service providers in the industry.

The Dataquest annual awards, now in its 17th year, have honored IT leaders like N Vittal, Ashok Soota, Azim Premji, Shiv Nadar, Rajendra Pawar, Ajay Chaudhury and S. Ramadorai over the years.

The jury included Lakshmi Narayanan, Vice Chairman of Cognizant and Dataquest IT Person of the Year 2008, Mr. Pradeep Gupta, CMD, CyberMedia; Mr. Sanjeev Aggarwal, MD, Helion Ventures; Mr. Ganesh Ayyar, CEO, MphasiS; Mr. R Chandrashekhar, Principal Secretary (IT), Govt of India; Ms. Neelam Dhawan, MD, HP India; Mr. Sunil Kapoor, Director, Fortis Healthcare; Mr.Ninad Karpe, CEO, Aptech; Mr. Shyam Malhotra, Director & Editor in Chief, CyberMedia and Mr. Som Mittal, President, Nasscom.

Top Corporate Awards for TCS, HP, NIIT, SAP and 9 others
The corporate awards were given to the following companies on the basis of various annual surveys that Dataquest conducts on the IT industry.

The Top Systems Company Award: HP
HP emerged as the clear leader in almost all categories of computer systems: in PCs (desktops and notebooks) and servers with 20% market share in PCs and 35% in servers.

Top Software Company Award: SAP
For the first time in Dataquest Awards, an enterprise software company—SAP--bagged this award marking the beginning of a new phase in the IT adoption maturity in India.

Top Networking Company Award: Cisco
For overwhelmingly dominating the network equipment market, with 80% share and retaining leadership position in the key segments of network equipment: routers, switches and .WLAN products.

Top Distribution Company Award: Ingram Micro
For emerging as the leading distribution company in a market affected by slowdown and for creating a more efficient supply chain and notching up revenues of nearly $2 billion.

Top Imaging and Printing Award: HP
HP retained its pole position by introducing innovative models and products in the printing and imaging market with a dominant market share across categories.

Top Training Company Award: NIIT
The industry’s undisputed training leader--in corporate training, retail, domestic and export market –since inception and now a leading player in the global e-learning landscape.

Top Services Company (India Market) Award: IBM
By clocking in revenue of Rs. 2,340 crore and growing at 77% IBM emerged as a clear leader in the Indian services market and setting directions for where the market is going--total outsourcing

Top BPO Company Award: Genpact
The top BPO company award for 2009 has gone to Genpact, a pioneer in almost everything in BPO, by recording revenues of Rs. 4,086 crore and growing at 54%.

Best Smart phone Vendor Award: Nokia
As more and more features are being made available on the phone, enterprises and Individuals are turning to smart phones for doing tasks they earlier used their PCs to do. For leading the market with a 42% market share, Nokia gets the best smart phone vendor award, introduced for the first time this year in Dataquest Top20.

Best Employer for BPO Award: vCustomer
vCustomer has scored a hat-trick by wining the best employer for BPO award for the third successive year thanks to the company’s employee empowerment agenda and conviction that each of its employees is a potential C level manager.

Best IT Employer Award: HCL Infosystems
HCL Infosystems for consistently featuring among the top three positions in Dataquest-IDC Best Employer Survey for IT companies and for rising to the No. 1 position in 2009.

Top IT Company & Top Exporter Awards: TCS
TCS gets two awards for being the No 1 IT company with revenues of Rs. 23,822 crore and the top Software exporter in Dataquest Top20 rankings, 2009.

About CyberMedia
CyberMedia is South Asia's first and largest specialty media house, with 15 publications (including Dataquest, PCQuest, Voice&Data, BioSpectrum (India & Asia), Living Digital, , DQ Channels, DQ Week, Voice&Data Connect, Dare, Halsbury's Law Monthly and Technology Review India) in the infotech, telecom, consumer electronics and biotech areas, and is media value chain including the Internet (www.ciol.com), events and television. The group's media services include market research (IDC India), content management and multimedia

For Technology Review India
Sanjiv Kataria
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E-mail: 'Sanjiv dot Kataria at gmail dot com   

At CyberMedia:
Shyamanuja Das
Executive Editor, Dataquest
+91 98102 97587
‘shyamanujad at cybermedia dot Co dot.in