Satyam’s Ramalinga Raju is Dataquest IT Man Of The Year

NEW DELHI: B. Ramalinga Raju, Chairman, Satyam Computer Services Ltd., has

been adjudged the IT Man Of The Year 2000, by Dataquest, for his contribution in

creating India’s leading IT software and services group that is at the

cutting-edge by world standards.

Dataquest has also honored Dr Srinivasan Ramani, Director (R&D),

Silverline Technologies Ltd. and former Director, National Center For Software

Technology (NCST), with the Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution of

over two decades to keep India at the forefront of datacom technology and the

Internet.

Ajit Balakrishnan, Chairman of Rediff.com, has received the Path Breaker

Award in recognition of his efforts for driving the dotcom revolution in India.

These prestigious awards and 14 others, were presented to winners at a gathering

of eminent figures from the IT industry at the capital’s Maurya Sheraton hotel

today.

A distinguished panel chaired by N R Narayana Murthy, Chairman and CEO,

Infosys Technologies Ltd., selected the winners. The panel included well known

industry personalities like Ajai Chowdhry, Chairman and CEO of HCL Infosystems

Ltd; Dewang Mehta, President, NASSCOM; Arun Seth, MD (South Asia) of BT

(Worldwide); Som Mittal, CEO, Digital Equipment India Ltd; Prince Azariah, CIO,

Bennett Coleman & Company Ltd; Pradeep Gupta, MD, Cyber Media (India) Ltd;

and Shyam Malhotra Editor-in-Chief, Cyber Publications.

The awardees were chosen after much deliberation by the selection panel. The

first round included consideration of the nominees through e-mail followed by a

discussion of the entire panel. Based on the supporting data provided by the

Dataquest research team, the panel short-listed nine nominees. The second round

brought the list down to five. The third and final round dwelt on the

achievements of individual contenders with regard to their track record in the

past year and contributions to the company and society.

The other awards went to Advanced Technology Devices (Top Growth Company),

Tech Pacific (Top Distributor), HP (Top Printer Vendor), Samsung (Top

Peripherals Vendor), Cisco Systems (Top Networking Vendor), Microsoft (Top

Packaged Software Vendor), IBM (Top MNC), Wipro (Top IT Vendor), HCL Group (Top

IT Group), HCL Infosystems (Top PC Vendor and Top Hardware Vendor), and TCS (Top

Software Vendor and Top Software Exporter).

Since the institution of the DQ Awards in 1993, Dataquest has honored

prominent names from the IT Industry like N Vittal (1993), Ashok Soota (1994),

Shiv Nadar (1995), NR Narayana Murthy (1996), Dewang Mehta (1997), RS Pawar

(1998) and Azim Premji (1999).