Premji wins Dataquest Lifetime Achievement Award

NEW DELHI, INDIA: India's prestigious Dataquest Lifetime Achievement Award of the year was presented to the chairman of Wipro Corp Azim Premji, whose vision and perseverance helped sculpt the Indian IT industry. The award was presented on Thursday by Pradeep Gupta, Dataquest publisher and CyberMedia chairman and Saurabh Srivastava, Chairman Emeritus of TiE Delhi.

India's corporate scene has been filled with many remarkable feats from Premji and his associates. He asked the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) Bangalore to work out design options for a computer that Wipro could manufacture and decided to go along with IISc’s recommendation to build Intel's 16-bit 8086 architecture, when others were still toying with 8-bit systems. The rest is history.

Another first from Wipro was the 'Lab-on-Hire' concept that allowed technology companies like Intel, Sun, Motorola and Cisco to use the services of Indian engineers - something that in later years would become the big wave of offshore outsourcing.

Be it getting into infrastructure management or BPO, under the vision of Premji, Wipro always remained focused on identifying new areas and getting into them quickly. While firmly establishing the company as a leading IT services firm globally, Wipro focused on the Indian market to emerge as one of the top services firms in the domestic market across all user segments.

Premji invested significant personal time, money and energy to close the gap in India's primary education, through the Azim Premji Foundation.

“First I was confused that whether I should take this award or not because most of Lifetime Achievement award means end of one’s inning. But I accepted this award for 100 thousand people who have done a lot to bring up Wipro and this award is for them,” said Premji while receiving the award.