Dataquest IT Man Of The Year is Ramalinga Raju

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 NR Narayana Murthy, Chairman and CEO, Infosys Technologies Ltd selected the winners. The panel also included well known industry personalities like Ajai Chowdhry, Chairman and CEO, HCL Infosystems Ltd; Dewang Mehta, President, NASSCOM; Arun Seth, MD (South Asia), 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 provide by the Dataquest research team, 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.

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).

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).