India's most respected achievement awards in the information technology sector were announced last evening. The Dataquest IT Person of the Year was given to Ajai K Chowdhry of HCL Infosystems, and the Lifetime Achievement Award to N R Narayana Murthy of Infosys respectively. In addition, a dozen awards were given to the Top 10 manufacturers and IT service providers. 

Ajai K Chowdhry, Chairman and CEO of HCL Infosystems, was honoured with the Dataquest IT Person of the Year 2007 and presented a plaque by Nandan M Nilekani, Co-Chairman, Infosys, and the Dataquest IT Person of the Year 2006. 

The award was given to Chowdhry for passionately focusing on the Indian domestic market, and believing in the potential of computer hardware manufacturing in India. The awards were presented in a glittering ceremony in the presence of leaders from all sections of the IT industry on Tuesday night. 

The Dataquest IT Lifetime Achievement Award was conferred on N R Narayana Murthy, Chairman and Chief Mentor of Infosys Technologies, for successfully building a company that not only changed the rules of global IT services, but made Indians proud of their nationality and India the epicenter of the software action.

The Pathbreaker of the Year 2007 award was given to Project Bhoomi, the Government of Karnataka project for digitization of land records. Started in 1999, this project has so far touched the lives of over 6.7 million farmers and other landowners across the state. 

This event also marked the 25th Anniversary of Dataquest and CyberMedia. The Dataquest annual awards, now in its 15 th year, have honored IT leaders like N Vittal, Ashok Soota, Azim Premji, Shiv Nadar, Rajendra Pawar, Kiran Karnik and S. Ramadorai over the years. 

Speaking on the occasion, Pradeep Gupta, Chairman of CyberMedia said, "An entrepreneurial effort that started out as one magazine, Dataquest, 25 years ago has grown into South Asia's largest specialty publication group with 15 titles." 

The CyberMedia group's journey over the last 25 years has been synonymous with the evolution of technology journalism as well as B2B media in India.

"CyberMedia is also the first media house to have ventured outside the country to a global audience publishing two magazines - BioSpectrum Asia from Singapore and Global Services from the US.," Gupta added.

The winners were chosen by a panel of experts comprising Nandan M Nilekani, Co-Chairman, Infosys; Alok Ohrie, CEO and MD of AMD; Dr Ganesh Natarajan, Deputy Chairman & MD of Zensar Technologies; Dr Jai Menon, Director (IT & Innovation) at Bharti Airtel; Revathi Kasturi, the then MD, Novell West Asia; Rahul Bhasin, Senior Partner, BPEP International; Sanjeev Bikhchandani, CEO, Naukri.com; Pradeep Gupta, Chairman, CyberMedia; and Shyam Malhotra, Editor in Chief of CyberMedia Publications. 

Speaking about the 2007 Awards, Dataquest Chief Editor Prasanto K. Roy said, "The Dataquest 2007 awards are significant because the first time in this decade the Dataquest Person of the Year is associated completely with the domestic IT industry. I firmly believe that the foundation of future growth of the overall IT industry as well as of the economy and GDP, will be the local market and industry." 

Under IT Person of the Year 2007 Ajai Chowdhry's leadership, HCL pioneered many products and services. Whether it was creating the market of home users for computers, or creating a retail experience that would draw users to a computer store, he pursued his beliefs and succeeded, and thereby established new ground rules. 

Chowdhry was also one of the first to recognize the user-side convergence. He repositioned HCL as a digital lifestyle company and broadened HCL's business from computers to ICT user products. He changed the rules of the telecom equipment game when HCL entered telecom distribution business with Nokia. 

Dataquest IT Lifetime Achievement Awardee Narayana Murthy founded Infosys in 1981 along with six other software professionals. He served as the CEO for 21 years before handing over the reins of the company to co-founder Mr. Nandan Nilekani in March 2002. Under Murthy's leadership, Infosys was listed on NASDAQ in 1999. 

Murthy successfully led Infosys in the formative years, when IT was not a high-profile industry. It was a daring act to set up an ethical and value-driven company under the Licence Raj. Project Bhoomi has been instrumental in liberating 6.7 million farmers caught between bureaucratic red-tape and middlemen. Dataquest honors scores of design architects, computer programmers, and government officials who envisaged and successfully implemented this project. 

Corporate Awards
The corporate awards were given to the following companies on the basis of various annual surveys that Dataquest magazine conducts on the performance of the IT industry. 

Hewlett Packard bagged the Top PC Vendor award as it shipped 744,686 PCs last year. HP, was also the unchallenged leader in the Printing and Imaging segment, with a greater market share than all other competitors put together. 

Ingram Micro won the Top Distributor award with revenues of over Rs. 6,800 crore. This was Ingram Micro's first financial year after its merger with Tech Pacific when it added new lines of business. 

NIIT was honored as the Top IT Training Company as it offers IT education across the globe and posted net revenues of Rs. 795 crore last fiscal. 

In the Networking segment the Cisco Systems maintained its monopoly as the Top Networking Vendor with 81% router market share and 73% of the switches market. 

This year, IBM India emerged as the Top Server Company in India with a market share of 34% across the x86 & non x86 range. 

With acquisitions, large deals and new markets Tata Consultancy Services posted a growth of 33% in revenues to cross Rs. 18000 crore. TCS registered 87% growth in software exports to emerge as India's biggest software exporter. 

TCS also emerged a great place to work, and bagged the Best Employer Award for the year 2007, as per a Dataquest-IDC survey. 

In the IT and ITeS sector, vCustomer was ranked at #1, and bagged the Best BPO Employer Award.

IIT Kharagpur was ranked #1 in the Dataquest-IDC survey of India 's top technology institutes that provide future leaders to Indian and global IT industry. IIT Kharagpur posted a significant improvement in infrastructure and industry interface. 

About CyberMedia
CyberMedia is South Asia's first and largest specialty media house, with thirteen publications (including Dataquest, DQ Channels and DQ Week, PCQuest, Voice&Data and Global Services) in the infotech, telecom, consumer electronics and biotech areas, and is a media value chain including Internet ( www.ciol.com), events and television. The group's media services include market research (IDC India), job board (CyberMedia Dice), content management, multimedia, and media education. 

For media inquiries, please contact: :
At Strategic Communications and PR 
Sanjiv Kataria
+ 91 98100 48095
Sanjiv.kataria@gmail.com 

At CyberMedia: 
Shyamanuja Das 
Executive Editor, Dataquest, 
+91 98102 97587
shyamanujad@cybermedia.co.in