F&S salutes India's 'best' ICT firms

NOIDA: Growth consulting company Frost & Sullivan hosted the annual Frost & Sullivan Technology Awards recently to recognize and honour outstanding performance by companies and individuals in the information and communication technology (ICT) industry across the

country for base year 2004.

"2004 was a challenging year with competition stiffer than ever, coupled

with emerging disruptive technologies. ICT companies across India have

had to innovate and reinvent to rise to the challenge and increase their

value proposition to stay on top of the game," said Alok Shende, director

of ICT practice at Frost & Sullivan.

The awards, seeking to showcase best practices in the vendor and service provider segments, saw 42 of the most coveted titles in technology being presented. Sailesh Dave, global director for 'best practices,' officiated the function.

The key evaluation criteria employed in the benchmarking study and judging process were based on actual market performance indicators for calendar year 2004. These include revenue growth, market share and growth in market share, leadership in product innovation, breadth of products and solutions, major customer acquisitions, and business and market strategy.

"The recipients of the Frost & Sullivan Technology Awards 2005 indeed represent the best in their class. Each of these outstanding recipients has demonstrated significant growth and leadership in their respective market segments. A common factor across all the award recipients is that they have significantly contributed to growing the industry either by bringing in strong new value propositions to the market or by developing new market segments," Shende said.

Among the winning companies were: MBT -- Security Strategist of the Year Award; IBM -- Market Leadership Award for Enterprise Portals Software Market, Market Leadership Award for Enterprise Application Integration Software Market, Market Leadership Award for Advanced Collaboration Platforms Market; SAP -- Market Leadership Award for CRM Software Market, Market Leadership Award for Mid Market ERP Software Market; Nortel Networks -- Market Leadership Award for IVR Systems Market; Cisco Systems -- Market Leadership Award for Firewall/VPN Appliances Market, Market Leadership Award for Wireless LAN Market

Cisco Systems, Competitive Strategy Award for IP Telephony; HCL Comnet -- Marketing Leadership Award for the Security Systems

Integration, Market Penetration Leadership Award for Managed Security

Services Market; Trend Micro -- Market Leadership Award for E-Mail Filtering market; Bharti -- Market Leadership Award for Managed WAN Services Market; Avaya GlobalConnect -- Market Leadership Award for PBX Market, Market Leadership Award for IP - PBX Market, Market Leadership Award for ACD Market, Market Leadership Award for CTI Enabling Software Market; and VSNL -- Market Leadership in the National Bandwidth Market, Market Leadership in the International Bandwidth Market.