BANGALORE: PCQuest, India’s leading infotech magazine, today announced the results of the PCQuest Users Choice Awards 2003 at a ceremony attended by top management of different industries including the IT industry as well as the IT user industries. This was the fifteenth edition of the prestigious PCQuest users Choice Awards.

Indian CIOs chose Microsoft as the most admired IT vendor even as open source software makes inroads into Indian enterprises, while Wipro was voted the most admired Indian IT vendor.

While open source software has not yet won any awards, Linux, OpenNMS and My SQL figure in the list of the top five software used by Indian enterprises in their respective categories (web server and office suites did not figure in the surveyed categories).

The awards are divided into two categories : Personal and Enterprise. The survey covered the major IT user cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Pune, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Ahmedabad.

For the enterprise category, CIOs of companies with an annual IT spend of Rs 25 lacs or more were interviewed. All the major verticals of manufacturing, banking and finance, government, PSUs, services, BPO, telecom and consultants were covered in the survey. For the personal segment, the respondents were users with a monthly household income of Rs 25,000 or more and who had a personal computer or notebook at home and/or office.

The survey, interestingly, also revealed that the average Indian enterprise still has a long way to go when it comes to IT implementation. Only 56% of the companies surveyed had an internet security solution in place and only 24% plan to implement one in the immediate future. Again, only 60% of the corporates surveyed had large volume data backup systems in place and only 34% plan to implement oen in the coming months. Given the concerns with data security and business continuity that have dominated IT discussions and even RBI policy, this is both a cause for concern and a huge opportunity for tech vendors in the country.

(CNS)