Snapdeal founder Kunal Bahl becomes Dataquest IT Person of the Year

BANGALORE, INDIA: Kunal Bahl, co-founder and CEO of Snapdeal bagged the prestigious Dataquest IT Person award for 2014.

This year, the annual Dataquest Awards have honored the individuals and enterprises for their outstanding contributions to Indian ICT as well as for demonstrating leadership, quality and innovation in using ICT in their respective fields.

Kunal was chosen for successfully leveraging state of the art IT and communications technologies to launch e-commerce marketplace Snapdeal and quickly making it India's fastest growing site with a valuation of over $ 2 billion.

“This award will encourage me towards our vision for creating life changing experiences for 1 million small businesses in India,” said Bahl as the first reaction to the award.

The awards were presented at a glittering ceremony in CeBIT Bangalore last week. Presenting the awards, chief guest NR Narayana Murthy, founder of Infosys, and himself the winner of Dataquest IT Person award in 1996, and Lifetime Achievement  Award in 2007, said that “Dataquest has been doing a great service to Indian IT industry by recognizing those who are bringing about a change by using technology”.

The winners were shortlisted by a jury of renowned industry leaders including CP Gurnani, CEO and MD, TechMahindra; Harsh Chitale, CEO and MD of HCL Infosystems; Alok Ohrie, Managing Director, Dell India;  Dinesh Malkani, president, Cisco – India & SAARC; S Ramasamy, Director IT, Indian Oil; Anil Chaudhry, Managing Director, Schneider India; Prof Surendra Prasad, ex-Director, IIT Delhi; and Pradeep Gupta, CMD, CyberMedia.

The Lifetime Achievement Award for 2014 went to Saurabh Srivastava, co-founder of NASSCOM, who was one of the main drivers behind the launch of NASSCOM in 1988, the body that played a key role in catapulting India as a software services giant.

The Dataquest Pathbreaker Award went to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's digital and social media team for 2014 general elections that played an important role in the historical win for the Bharatiya Janata Party.

The Dataquest Jury's Special Award went to Arundhati Bhattacharya, Chairman, State Bank of India for some of the technology lead innovations that made banking easy and safe for the common man, and reaching out to millions of people who are not covered by the banks.

The evening also saw the presentation of Dataquest corporate awards for IT, and Voice&Data corporate awards for communications. These awards are given on fiscal year revenue performance based on the two surveys – DQTop20 and V&D100 - that these brands do every year. Both of these are the oldest and the most comprehensive surveys that cover almost 35 categories in IT and telecom. A summary of the survey was presented by the Group Editor of PC Quest & CIOL, Thomas George.

The corporate award winners in the various product and services categories were as follows :

A4 DMP and Ink SF Printers: Epson

Database & CRM: Oracle

SCM, BI and ERP: SAP

Middleware: IBM

PCs and Printer: HP

Servers, and Infrastructure Management Software: HP

Carrier Networking, Enterprise Active Networking, PBX, Desk Phones: Cisco

Test & Measurement: Keysight Technologies

Structured Cabling: TE Connectivity

Core & Access Equipment: Ericsson

Datacards: Huawei

Tablets & Mobile Handsets: Samsung

Managed Services: Nokia Networks

Network Integration: Wipro

Power Solutions: Delta Electronics

Telecom Towers: Indus Towers

OSS/BSS: Amdocs

Telecom Software, Solutions & Consulting: TCS

Fixed Line, and Fixed Broadband Services: BSNL

VSAT Services: Hughes Communications

Enterprise Services: Tata Communications

Wireless Broadband Services, Overall Internet Services, Mobile Services: Airtel

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