HCL's Ajai Chowdhry is Dataquest 'IT Person of the Year 2007'

NEW DELHI: Ajai K. Chowdhry, chairman and CEO of HCL Infosystems has been named the Dataquest ‘IT person of the Year 2007.’

While Infosys' N. R. Narayana Murthy was felicitated with the ‘Lifetime Achievement Award,’ Karnataka's Bhoomi project bagged the Path-breaker award.

India’s most respected achievement awards in the IT sector were given away last evening; along with a dozen prestigious awards for the Top 10 manufacturers and IT service providers.

Ajai K. Chowdhry, chairman and CEO of HCL Infosystems, was honoured with the Dataquest ‘IT Person of the Year 2007,’ by Nandan Nilekani, co-chairman of Infosys and the Dataquest ‘IT person of the year 2006.’ Chowdhry was honoured for passionately focusing on the Indian domestic market and believing in the potential of computer hardware manufacturing in India. He had also pioneered in creating the home-user market for computers and was also the first to recognise the user-side of convergence.

The Dataquest IT Lifetime achievement Award was conferred on Infosys chairman and chief mentor, N. R. Narayana Murthy for successfully building a company that not only changed the rules of global IT services. Narayana Murthy had made Indian’s proud of their nationality and India the epicentre of the software action.

Project Bhoomi – an initiative by the Government of Karnataka for digitizing of land records across the state was recognised with the ‘Path-breaker of the Year 2007’ Award. The project, started in 1999 has so far touched the lives of 6.7 million farmers and other landowners across the southern state.

Corporate Awards

The Corporate Awards were given based on the various annual surveys that Dataquest magazine conducted on the performance of the IT industry.

Hewlett-Packard bagged the Top PC Vendor Award as it shipped 744, 686 PCs last year. HP was also the unchallenged leader in the printing and imaging segment, with greater market share than all other companies put together.

Ingram Micro bagged the top distributor award with revenues of over Rs 6800 crore. This was Ingram Micro’s first financial year after its merger with Tech Pacific when it added new lines of business. NIIT was honoured as the top IT training company as it offers education across the globe and posted net revenues of Rs 795 crore last fiscal.

In the networking segment, Cisco Systems maintained its monopoly as the top networking vendor with 81 percent router market share and 73 percent of the switches market. IBM India too maintained its position as the top server company in India with a market share of 34 per cent across the x86 and non-x86 range.

With acquisitions, large deals and new markets –- Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) posted a growth of 33 percent in revenues to cross Rs 18000 crore, and registering an impressive 87 per cent growth. TCS, thus emerged as the India’s biggest software exporter. The company also bagged the best employer award for the year 2007 and thus becoming great place to work as per the Dataquest-IDC survey.

In the IT and ITeS sector, vCustomer was ranked no.1 and bagged the best BPO employer award, and IIT-Kharagpur was adjudged as numero-uno and becoming India’s top technology institutes that provide future leaders to Indian and global IT industry. Dataquest-IDC survey found that IIT-Karaghpur had posted a significant improvement in infrastructure and industry interface.

The winners were chosen by an eminent panel of experts comprising Nandan M. Nilekani, co-chairman of Infosys; Alok Ohrie, CEO and MD of AMD; Dr Ganesh Natarajan, deputy chairman and MD of Zensar Technologies; Dr Jai Menon, director (IT and Innovation), Bharti Airtel; Revathi Kasturi, the then MD of Novell West Asia; Rahul Bhasin, senior partner, Barings Private Equity Partners; and Sanjeev Bhikchandani, CEO of Naukri.com. Pradeep Gupta, chairman of CyberMedia; Shyam Malhotra, Editor-in-Chief of CyberMedia were also part of the selection panel.

The event also marked the 25th Anniversary of Dataquest and CyberMedia. The Dataquest annual awards, now in its 15th year, have honoured IT leaders like N. Vittal, Ashok Soota, Azim Premji, Shiv Nadar, Rajendra Pawar, Kiran Karnik and S. Ramadorai over the years.