Srinath N is V&D Telecom Person of the Year 2008

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Eminent telecom industry leader Srinath N, MD and CEO of Tata Communications was named the Voice&Data Telecom Person of the Year 2008 by Pradeep Gupta, Chairman, CyberMedia, Publishers of Voice&Data. 

Wajahat Habibullah, Chief Information Commissioner, Central Information Commission, presented the award to Srinath at the 9th Annual V&D 100 Awards function.

Srinath was chosen for this honor for transforming erstwhile VSNL from a domestic player to a multinational telecom company. Under his leadership the Tata Communications global network became the world’s largest submarine cable network that connects global citizens to over 200 countries. Tata Communications’ global footprint now serves customers in 80 cities from 40 countries.

Past Winners of Voice&Data Telecom Person of the Year award include Anil Ambani, Dayanidhi Maran, Mukesh Ambani, Ratan Tata and Sunil Bharti Mittal.

IMImobile was awarded the honor of being the Emerging Company of the Year for their significant contribution in the value added services (VAS) space. IMImobile provides carrier grade messaging platforms and gateways, content management systems, and Voice platforms through managed services in 51 countries.

Manoj Kumar Upadhyay, Managing Director, Acme Tele Power was conferred the honor of Technovator of the Year for his remarkable contribution in providing innovative, energy efficient and environment friendly products for passive telecom infrastructure. Upadhyay is the inventor of seven patented product innovations and processes mainly in the energy efficiency area.

The Voice&Data awards were instituted in 2000 to honor leading players in the burgeoning telecom sector that posted revenues of over Rs 2,25,967 crore in 2007-08. As per the Voice&Data survey 2008 the telecom services sector grew 21.3 percent to Rs 1,30,561 crore on the back of 66.3 percent increase in telecom subscriber base while the telecom equipment sector grew 24 percent to Rs 95,407 crore.

Touching upon the challenges for the Telecom industry in the current year, Prasanto K Roy, Chief Editor of Voice&Data said, “The big challenges from the regulatory viewpoint will be the release of spectrum to telcos, and mobile number portability. The roll out of 3G and WiMax during the year will be key to the spread of the Internet -- given that India will once again miss achieving its broadband penetration targets this year.”

Pradeep Gupta, Chairman, Cybermedia shared, "Telecom is bridging the digital divide. Operators have started actually focusing on rural and suburban areas in a big way. More than half the new mobile subscriber additions are from places with less than 20k population."

The Telecom Person of the Year, the Emerging Company of the Year and the Technovator of the Year were announced following an eight-member jury meet of eminent professionals led Dr DPS Seth, ex-CMD of BSNL and ex-member of TRAI. The other members of the jury meet included NK Goyal, Chairman, Emeritus TEMA; DP Vaidya, President, VSAT Association; SC Khanna, Secretary General, AUSPI; Vikram Tiwatia, CIO, CII; Rajiv Nayan Jha, VP, CMAI and Pradeep Gupta, Chairman MD, CyberMedia.

 

For the 2008 Indian Telecom Industry survey, the flagship publication for the telecom industry, Voice&Data covered over 650 equipment and services companies.

In the handsets category Bharti Teletech, LG Electronics and Nokia were declared the winners in the Fixed Phones, Fixed Wireless Phones and Mobile Phones category respectively.

For Telecom Software, Network Integration, Network Storage, Network Management Services the winners were TCS, Wipro Infotech, EMC and HCL Comnet respectively.

For overall telecom services and fixed national long distance categories, BSNL was the winner. For cellular and broadband services Bharti Airtel was the winner while the honor for the international long distance dialing went to Tata Communications.

In the infrastructure and equipment category the winners were Ericsson (for Wireless Infrastructure), Cisco Systems (for Enterprise Equipment) and Nokia (for Telecom Equipment).

Other category winners included:

Audio Video Conferencing: Polycom

Broadband Infrastructure: UTStarcom

Modem: Atrie Technology

Router, Switch, WLAN: Cisco

Structured Cabling: Tyco Electronics

Test & Measurement: Agilent Technologies

Telecom Cables: Sterlite Technologies

Telecom Turnkey: GTL Ltd

Transmission: ECI Telecom

Voice Solutions: Avaya GlobalConnect

VSAT: Hughes Communications

Radio Trunking: Arvind Ltd

VAS: Onmobile

WiMax: Telsima Communications