Moser Baer chief DQ 'IT Man of the Year'

NEW DELHI: Moser Baer chief, Deepak Puri, has won the coveted "IT Man of the Year 2003" award by Dataquest for `putting India on the global hardware manufacturing map by making Moser Baer the world’s third largest manufacturer of optical media.’

"Under Puri’s leadership, Moser Baer has been growing at a CAGR of 177 per cent in the last five years and has increased manufacturing capacity by over 30 times, in spite of all the slowdown," said the top industry magazine in a statement.

The two other awards announced today were Lifetime Achievement Award, conferred upon Vijay Bhatkar, chairman ETH Research Lab, and the Path-breaker Award, conferred on Ashok Jhunjhunwala of IIT, Madras.

Bhatkar, known as the father of Indian supercomputing, was honored for making India self reliant in high end computing, and his role in promoting multilingual computing to take IT to the masses. Jhunjhunwala, nationally accepted as a classic example of academics-industry-entrepreneur confluence, was chosen for the award for his low cost telecom solutions for taking IT and communications to rural areas.

The panel of judges who decided the winners, included Mittal, S Regunathan, IT secretary, Delhi Government, Kiran Karnik, president, Nasscom, Ajit Balakrishnan, CEO, Rediff.Com, Suresh Kalpati, chairman and CEO, SSI, SR Balasubramanian, CIO Hero Honda, Pradeep Gupta, Publisher, Cyber Media and Shyam Malhotra, Editor in Chief, Cyber Media.

The awards were presented by Chairman and MD of Bharti Group, Sunil Bharti Mittal, himself, a winner of "IT Man of the Year 2002". Sam Pitroda received the Lifetime Achievement Award and Raman Roy walked away with the Pathbreaker Award, last year.

Also presented on the occasion were the "Dataquest Top 20" corporate awards.

Tata Group — Top IT Group

Tata Consultancy Services — Top IT Company

HCL Infosystems — Top PC Vendor

Tech Pacific India — Top IT Distributor

Microsoft India - Top Packaged SW Vendor

Hewlett Packard India — Top Printer Vendor

Samsung India - Top Peripherals Vendor

Cisco Systems India - Top Networking Company

Hewlett Packard India - Top Hardware Vendor

Moser Baer — Fastest Growing Company

NIIT — Top Training Company

Cadence Design Systems — IT Best Employer

GE Caps — BPO Employee Satisfaction Award.

(CyberMedia News Service)