Cyber Media celebrates 20 years of being

Cyber Media India Ltd (CMIL), a leading publishing house catering to the various segments of the IT industry through it segment specific magazines and Dataquest, Voice & Data, PC Quest and Computers@Home channel magazines like DQWeeks and DQ Channels India and the end-user magazines like Computers@Home and PCQuest, etc., celebrated two decades of existence amid much goodwill and excitement. Twenty years ago, the nascent Indian IT industry felt the need for organized information and thus was born the first dedicated magazine for the industry. Pradeep Gupta, Managing Director of the company, then a young graduate from IIT and IIM Kolkata, dreamt of the project with friends on a barsaati and launched the first issue of Dataquest magazine in December 1982.

The celebration coincided with the magazine's annual awards function where the top performers during the previous year were honored. Among the winners included the Tata Group as the top IT Group; TCS as the top IT company and top software exporter; Compaq as the top hardware vendor; Tech Pacific as the top IT distributor; HCL Infosystems as the top PC vendor; Microsoft as the top packaged software vendor; HP as the top printer vendor; Samsung as the top peripherals vendor; Cisco as the top networking vendor and Moser Baer as the fastest growing DQ Top 20 company.

The highlight of the event was the award for Lifetime achievement to Sam Pitroda, the man who scripted India's PCO revolution. The IT Man of the year award was given to Sunil Bharti Mittal, Chairman of the Bharti Group and the Pathbreaker's award was given to Raman Roy of Spectramind Ltd. Interestingly all the three individuals are all from telecom reflecting the sector's criticality in the development of IT. Pramod Mahajan, Union Minister for IT and Telecommunication, who was the chief guest of the event, gave away the awards.

The special Dataquest panel comprised Pramod Mahajan, Union Minister for IT and Telecom (the chairman of the panel), CN Ram, IT head, HDFC Bank, Jerry Rao, founder and CEO, MphasiS BFL, Suresh Vaswani, president, Wipro Infotech, Abraham Thomas, CEO, IBM India, Satish Kaura, chairman, Samtel, Rajiv Nair, head, Microsoft India, Kiran Karnik, president, NASSCOM, Pradeep Gupta, managing director, Cyber Media and Shyam Malhotra, editor-in-chief, Cyber Publications.

The event was attended by the who's who of the IT industry. Sample this: Nandan M Nilekani, CEO, President and Managing Director of Infosys; Balu Doraisamy, MD, HP India; Rajendra Pawar, Chairman and CEO of NIIT Ltd, Jerry Rao, Chairman and CEO of Mphasis BFL Ltd; Ajai Chowdhry, Chairman and CEO of HCL Infosystems; FC Kohli, former deputy chairman and executive committee member of TCS; Phiroz Vandrevala, Senior VP, TCS and Kiran Karnik, President,

NASSCOM. 

With so many industry luminaries under one roof, a debate about raging industry issues was inevitable. And who better to conduct such a show than the articulate Congress politician heading the party's Economic Cell--Jairam Ramesh. The debate centered around issues like how should India navigate the next phase of growth by developing the hardware base; how should India react to the China factor and finally the issue of digital penetration. 

Mittal predicted that the next wave of telecom investment would be in software and herein lies India's opportunity both domestically and globally. Pawar said that instead of shying away from the China market, it was prudent to set up bases there and use it as delivery centers for the markets in the East. 

Karnik pointed out the need for developing relevant content to take IT to the masses. He said it was more important to focus on the accessibility rather than the ownership of digital devices.

Pitroda, the man who galvanized the Indian telecom revolution and initiated local development of telecom technologies, spoke of the next phase of development, which would be to network the thousands of PCOs in the country's nook and corner.

Instead of merely providing voice services, the PCO's should become the center of activity in the common man's life with facilities like bill payments, accessing information from government departments and money transaction facilities. The need of the hour was to leverage the PCO's points of presence and expand the scope of activity. 

Today, after 20 years of existence, the CMIL group has spawned an entire range of offerings related to IT with well known sister companies like IDC, the IT research arm of the group on whose predictions industry leaders rely and form up their strategies, Cyber India Online Ltd (CIOL), the oldest Indian IT portal, Cyber Multimedia (CMM), which is into multimedia publications and distribution, Cyber Expo, which is an event management company, etc.

Cyber News Service