By IANS
New Delhi : Ajai Chowdhry, chairperson and CEO of HCL Infosystems, has been conferred the award for IT Person of the Year 2007 by Dataquest, the premier magazine of the IT industry published by the CyberMedia group.
Dataquest chief editor Prasanto K. Roy said: “The Dataquest 2007 awards are significant because for the first time in this decade the Dataquest Person of the Year is associated completely with the domestic IT industry. I firmly believe that the foundation of future growth of the overall IT industry as well as of the economy and GDP, will be the local market and industry.”
The Lifetime Achievement Award went to Infosys chairman and chief mentor N.R. Narayana Murthy for building an institution that has been recognised globally and changed the IT scenario of the country.
The awards were given at a glittering ceremony at the Taj Palace Hotel in the national capital Tuesday evening. The event, which was attended by industry leaders, corporate honchos and government officials among others, also marked the 25th anniversary of the magazine and the Cybermedia group.
Pradeep Gupta, chairperson of Cybermedia, said: “An entrepreneurial effort that started out as one magazine, Dataquest, 25 years ago has grown into South Asia’s largest specialty publication group with 15 titles.
“CyberMedia is also the first media house to have ventured outside the country to a global audience publishing two magazines – BioSpectrum Asia from Singapore and Global Services from the US.”
The prestigious Pathbreaker of the Year 2007 award was won by the Karnataka government’s initiative of digitisation of land records under Project Bhoomi, which has benefited about 6.7 million farmers and landowners.
Under the Corporate Award section, Hewlett Packard (HP) grabbed the Top PC Vendor award as it shipped 744,686 personal computers last year. HP was also the unchallenged leader in the printing and imaging segment with a greater market share than its competitors.
Ingram Micro won the Top Distributor award with revenues of over Rs.680 billion (approx $17 billion) and NIIT was honoured as the Top IT Training Company as it offers IT education across the world.
Cisco Systems won the Top Networking Vendor award with 81 percent market share in routers and 73 percent in switches, while IBM India emerged as the Top Server Company in India.
India’s Biggest Software Exporter Award was awarded to Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) that posted a growth of 33 percent in revenues to cross Rs.180 billion. It also posted 87 percent growth in software exports. TCS also won the Best Employer Award for the year 2007.