NEW DELHI, INDIA: In a departure from its 17-year history, 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 on Thursday night to the Government-appointed director board of Satyam led by Kiran Karnik for its rapid action in averting the largest disaster in the history of corporate India.

Satyam’s board members include Deepak Parekh, C Achutan, Tarun Das, TN Manoharan and Suryakant Balkrishna Mainak, with Kiran Karnik as chairman.

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

“People talk about bureaucracy in India. When this Satyam crisis popped-up we saw bureaucrats working day and night, without any off. I got a call on a Sunday and was called on the same day for meeting. We saw all the government departments, industry and workforce at Satyam did their best to solve this crisis,” said Karnik.

Speaking on the occasion, Gupta 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.”

On the occasion, the Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Azim Premji, founder of Wipro and the Pathbreaker of the Year award was presented to Arvind Rao of OnMobile. 13 other awards were also presented to leaders in various categories.

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.

Top Corporate Awards

The 'Top Systems Company 'award was presented to HP, which emerged as the clear leader in almost all categories of computer systems: in PCs (desktops and notebooks) and servers with 20 per cent market share in PCs and 35 per cent in servers.

The 'Top Software Company' award was bagged by SAP. It was for the first time in Dataquest Awards, that an enterprise software company bagged this award marking the beginning of a new phase in the IT adoption maturity in India.

Cisco received the 'Top Networking Company' award for dominating the network equipment market, with 80 per cent share and retaining leadership position in the key segments of network equipment: routers, switches and .WLAN products.

The 'Top Distribution Company' award was given to 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.

HP bagged the 'Top Imaging and Printing' award for retaining its pole position by introducing innovative models and products in the printing and imaging market with a dominant market share across categories.

NIIT was awarded the 'Top Training Company' award. The company is a leader in corporate training, retail, domestic and export market since inception and now a leading player in the global e-learning landscape.

The global IT major IBM was adjudged the 'Top Services Company (India Market)'. The company, which clocked a revenue of Rs. 2,340 crore and grew at 77 per cent.

The 'Top BPO Company Award' for 2009 went to Genpact, a pioneer in almost everything in BPO, by recording revenues of Rs. 4,086 crore and growing at 54 per cent.

Phone maker Nokia bagged the 'Best Smartphone Vendor' award for leading the market with a 42 per cent market share. This award is introduced for the first time this year in Dataquest Top20.

vCustomer walked away with the 'Best Employer for BPO' award. The company scored a hat-trick by winning this award for the third successive year thanks to the company’s employee empowerment agenda.

The 'Best IT Employer' award was given to 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.

India's largest IT company TCS bagged the 'Top IT Company' and 'Top Exporter' awards. The company got the 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.

The corporate awards were given on the basis of various annual surveys that Dataquest conducted on the IT industry.