Top IT Projects 2012

BANGALORE, INDIA: With about 50 public nominations going through grueling audits and deliberations, 18 were chosen as finalists, and 3 emerged out as winners. Read ahead to know all about it.

PCQuest has been recognizing ingenious IT implementations put up by organizations from all over the country for nine years now in the form of the prestigious 'Best IT Implementation Awards'.

These awards are given out to 'IT implementations' that make a major difference to the organization and/or the users, clients, etc. When we say IT implementation, it does not necessarily mean IT solutions developed by the company who implemented it.

This year we decided to start bringing recognition to accomplishments and innovations being done by the Indian developer community. They're the ones who've spent sleepless nights on developing software and delivering them successfully for their clients all over the world.

They're the ones who have really innovated, and therefore deserve the accolades, and yet, their efforts go by un-noticed. And so, this year 'PCQuest - India's Top Software Projects' awards were introduced (http://forums.pcquest.com/itsp). These awards are meant to recognize unique and impactful software developed by ISVs, independent developers, and in-house development teams of organizations.

About the nominations

India's Top Software Projects had a nomination process similar to Best IT Implementations. That is, public nominations were sought by spreading the word about the awards via the magazine and our sister publications, our entire network of websites, social media, on-ground events, emailers, etc.

By the deadline, we had received about 50 nominations from across the country. When we had introduced Best IT Implementations nine years back, we received a total of 11 nominations - which has since grown to 300+ nominations this year. Keeping this fact at the back of our mind, we were happy with the number of nominations received. The mix of the nominations received was very impressive - some nominations were web based applications and others mobile apps, home-grown IT solutions, and yet some others were brilliant hooks created to work alongside the already implemented known IT software.

About the audits

The initial nominations were vetted by the editorial team of PCQuest to remove the projects that did not qualify as per the selection criteria (http://forums.pcquest.com/itsp/selection-process). The ones that qualified were asked to submit a detailed audit form. This form captures the complete details of the projects - right from the name of the project leader to what technologies were used, time taken, the result, etc.

Each one of these projects was allocated a project champion from the PCQuest team, who basically represented the project for internal audit purposes. The champions made a presentation to an internal jury meet at PCQuest, and points sought by the jury for clarification were noted down. The champions got in touch with the respective project heads and sought the information required for the final jury presentations. A total of 18 projects made it to the finals.

The jury

Since such awards require an in-depth technical knowledge in the area of software development, we chose our panelists likewise.

Vinod Unny, Managing Director, Enterprise InfoTech

Unny is the Managing Director of Enterprise InfoTech, a technology consultancy company based in Gurgaon. He has also been a Microsoft Regional Director for the entire North India Region since 2002.

Being a Microsoft Regional Director has not restricted his area of expertise. Although very well versed in Microsoft technologies, he has also worked on many other technologies including competitive ones. Unny works regularly on Linux and Open Source Software as well - and in doing so gains a much larger appreciation for the work done by Microsoft. He passes on this knowledge and appreciation regarding Microsoft technologies in comparison to Linux/OSS to audiences, clients and readers in his various evangelism efforts.

Shekhar Govindarajan, Managing Director, IT4Enterprise

Govindarajan works as a technology consultant for IT4Enterprise. He has over 12 years of experience in the technology industry. He started his career right here, with us, at PCQuest Labs. He has been a part of PCQLinux team since 2005.

Shekhar has worked across various platforms ranging from servers to embedded devices. He has developed application in programming languages like PHP, C#, Java, Perl and Ruby. He has a knack of being an early adopter of technologies and IT/consumer Electronic products.

Over the years, Shekhar has served clients from private, government and NGO sectors. His new found interests are home automation/entertainment and wildlife photography.He blogs at www.shekhargovindarajan.com and tweets @shekharg

Manik Juneja, Founder, VinSol

Juneja has over 15 years of experience in software development, ranging from client server to web based apps. Prior to starting VinSol, He was working in Japan with HCL Japan and then a Japanese Internet Startup. Not satisfied by the way Indian outsourcing companies were doing business, he launched VinSol in September 2000.

He has led the transition from being a Java shop to embracing open source languages like Perl and Python and finally Ruby.

He wonders whether with iOS has it come a full circle? He tried to balance that by spending equal energy on Android.

Kapil Dev Singh, Founder & Principal Consultant, Coeus Age

Singh has 18 years of experience, of which 16 years are in business research, he headed IDC in India for close to 8 years as Country Manager. With the objective of enabling Indian enterprises build business value from IT, he has founded Coeus Age.

Singh is a certified organization development consultant from ISABS, a leading body of applied behavioural sciences in India, where he was certified at the highest competency level. He is also a qualified consultant and practitioner of process maturity paradigms like ISO 9000: 2008, PCMM & Six Sigma.

Singh is an Engineer (Mechanical) and MBA (Marketing) by qualification & is currently pursuing doctoral work at MDI, Gurgaon. The topic of his research work is 'CIO role & its effectiveness'.

Anil Chopra, Editor, PCQuest

Chopra has over 16 years of editorial and analysis experience in the technology space. In his stint he has had the experience in the IT publishing business, specializing in managing all channels of media publications, including print, online, and events.

He started ground up from the PCQuest Labs, where he reviewed all sorts of IT products and services. That said, he has hands-on experience of almost all enterprise level as well as consumer products and services. Besides this, he also speaks at various technology seminars, from where he gains a lot of knowledge about the industry straight from the end users.

Selection of winners

When it comes to Best IT Implementations, the winners are chosen on the basis of the maximum business impact, maximum social impact, most technically complex, largest scale, and so on. However, for India's Top Software Projects, the same parameters don't apply.

So the jury members judged each project on the basis of - if the underlying idea in a software was appealing enough, does the software make a significant impact to the user, does the software make use of the appropriate and latest technologies, and so on.

Each finalist's case was put forth by the respective project champion. Lots of questions followed each presentation. In many cases, the project heads were contacted by the project champions, during the jury deliberations, so that no details are missed out. After almost 5-6 hours of discussions and deliberations, the final three winners were chosen.

We would like to congratulate the winners, and we would also like to congratulate the rest of the finalists for making it to the finals - it was a tough call for the judges to arrive upon the final three!

What follows next are the winners pages, followed by the other finalists.

Source: www.pcquest.www.ciol.com