A royal appreciation

It's the time of the year when we celebrate excellence by
giving away the DQ Channels Excellence awards to the best of the best solution
providers of the country. And this year, the excellence is being celebrated
royally-on board, the Star Cruise Libra.

More than 100 of India's best solution providers went on a two
nights and three days cruise from Mumbai to Goa and back. Besides one full day
of attending sessions relevant to their business, the SPs let their hair down in
the evening with some pulsating music and dance.

Amongst this dance and music, the achievements of the very best
of the lot were recognized by handing over the trophies. And these lucky SPs won
their respective trophies fending off tough competition from the others. The
distinguished jury consisting of Vivek Malhotra of Lenovo, Ajay Verma of
Symantec, Binod Panda of Ingram Micro and Hrishi Parthasarathy of Microsoft had
a really tough time in deciding on the winners. It took three rounds of
tea-coffee and plenty of debates before the winners could be decided.

Not surprising, most of the winners are no strangers to these
awards. They have been winning this award right since its inception. For
instance, my friend Ranjan Chopra of Team Computers now has five such trophies
in his showcase, which he has won in different categories over the last three
years. In fact, he has the unique distinction of winning the award each and
every year-a record that he shares with Nitin Shah of Allied Digital Services.

Besides Ranjan and Nitin, other big time winners include Ravi
Verdes of Frontier Business Machines and Devendra Taneja of PC Solutions. These
two have also won more than a couple of trophies right since the inception of
these awards in the year 2005.

So what makes these awards unique? For one, these are the only
set of awards that recognize the excellent work done by the SP community. These
awards were instituted to appreciate the efforts of SPs who have succeeded in
improving their business across several parameters-revenue, service
capability, innovation, initiative and business skills.

Every year, the DQ Channels editorial team spread across five
bureaus collects and collates the data received from a wide section of the SP
community. After sifting through the voluminous amount of data, the final set is
presented before a carefully chosen jury, which then deliberates and finally
comes to the final conclusion about the winners.

Interestingly, there is no voting system that is followed. Every
winner is chosen unanimously, a record we are proud of. So, let's all stand up
and give the winners a standing ovation. They truly deserve it.