NEW DELHI, INDIA: Indian IT's coveted Dataquest IT Person of the Year award for 2010 has been conferred on Pramod Bhasin, president and CEO of Genpact, India's largest BPO company. The award is given by Dataquest, India's oldest and largest IT magazine, published by CyberMedia, every year to an individual for making extraordinary contribution to Indian IT.

The winners are selected by a jury of eminent individuals from IT industry, IT user organizations and academicians among others. Some of the past IT persons of the year include Infosys’ NR Narayana Murthy, Wipro’s Azim Premji, NIIT’s Rajendra S Pawar, TCS’ FC Kohli, Cognizant’s Lakshmi Narayanan and former IT Secretary N Vittal.

The jury unanimously decided on Pramod Bhasin for his role in discovering the potential of India to provide business services to the world as the head of GE Capital in India and convincing GE to bet on the model which led to the creation of a big opportunity for India in the form of the BPO industry.

Later, he not only drove the growth of the company as an independent entity and achieved higher standards in operational excellence.

As chairman of NASSCOM, Bhasin was instrumental in building the value framework, driving the quality initiative and championed moving to Tier -2 locations.

“Dataquest award winners contribution goes beyond Indian IT. While Pramod Bhasin is building up India for becoming a global services hub, Shiv Nadar set up an organization and an industry that others followed, and Shantanu Prakash has successfully used technology to deliver quality and affordable education to small towns and villages,”  said Pradeep Gupta, chairman of CyberMedia, the publishers of Dataquest.

Shiv Nadar honoured

Shiv Nadar, founder of HCL and noted philanthropist, was conferred the Dataquest Lifetime Contribution award for his overall contribution to Indian IT. Nadar left a comfortable corporate job to co-found HCL from a single room in Delhi. It was one of the first companies in the world to launch a personal computer.

Later as he drove HCL's growth in various phases, the company also became a grooming ground for CEOs and entrepreneurs. In his second innings, Nadar has taken to philanthropy in a big way and created history by pledging to donate 10 per cent of his wealth. He had won the Dataquest IT Person of the Year award in 1995.

Pathbreaker CEO

Shantanu Prakash, founder and CEO of Educomp Solutions, was recognized as the Dataquest Pathbreaker of the Year 2010 for bringing about significant change in quality of education in Indian schools by effective use of IT. 

In 2009 the Dataquest IT Person of the year Award went to the Government-appointed Board of Satyam headed by Kiran Karnik for its rapid action in averting the largest disaster in the history of corporate India.

And as the winner of the last year Kiran Karnik headed the jury this year that included Pradeep Gupta, CMD of CyberMedia India (as Vice Chairman); Arun Gupta, Group CIO, Shoppers Stop and K Raheja Group; Aruna Sunderrajan, IAS; Ashwini Aggarwal, President, MAIT; Bhaskar Pramanik, MD, Oracle India; Prof Deepak Phatak, IIT Bombay; Naresh Wadhwa, MD, Cisco India; Shailesh Rao, MD, Google India; Shantanu Prakash, CEO, Educomp; and Shyam Malhotra, Editor-in-Chief, Dataquest as members.

The awards, now in the 18th year, were conferred at a glittering ceremony in the presence of industry leaders and attendees of the ongoing TiE Entrepreneurial Summit at New Delhi on Tuesday evening.

Dataquest Top 20

Dataquest also honored top manufacturers, service providers and institutions based on their Dataquest Top 20 rankings for FY 2009-10 and their performance in various surveys conducted by IT intelligence firm IDC and Dataquest last year.

Winner of three awards, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) retained the No 1 IT company in India award as also the Top Software Exporter award. Based on the performance in the DQ-IDC Best Employer Survey 2010, TCS regained the Best IT Employer award after a gap of one year.

The Dataquest Top Systems company award went to Hewlett-Packard (HP) India for recording highest combined revenue in sales of PCs (desktops and laptops), servers and workstations. With dominant market share, HP also won the Top Imaging and Printing Company for 2010 making it a total of two awards.

Cisco India won the Top Networking Company award for recording the highest sales in ,  networking equipment during 2009-10, with close to 80 per cent market share. The IT training pioneer NIIT won the award for Top Training Company for 2010.

IBM India remained ahead of others and won the top IT Services Company (India Market) award. The pioneering BPO Company Genpact with revenues of over one billion dollars bagged the Top BPO company award. Ingram Micro India bagged the Top Distribution Company award for 2010. Microsoft India topped the software products sales to bag the Top Software Company award for 2010.

Despite tough competition from new pure play smart phone makers and Indian companies, Nokia continued to lead the smart phone market and bagged the Top Smartphone Company award for 2010. BPO firm, vCustomer won the Best Employer BPO award based on its No 1 rank in DQ-IDC Best BPO Employer Survey 2010. IIT Bombay won the Top T School award based on its No 1 rank in DQ-IDC Top T School Survey 2010.