Narayana Murthy wins Dataquest Lifetime Award

Infosys chief mentor N R Narayana Murthy has been given the 'Lifetime Achievement Award' by IT magazine Dataquest for building an institution that has changed the IT scenario in the country.

Besides, Ajai Chowdhry, chairman and CEO of HCL Infosystems, has been adjudged the 'IT Person of the year' by the CyberMedia group publication.

"The Dataquest 2007 awards are significant as 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," Dataquest chief editor Prasanto K Roy said.

The 'Pathbreaker of the Year 2007' award was won by the Karnataka government for its initiative on digitisation of land records under Project Bhoomi, which has benefited about 6.7 million farmers and land owners.

Under the Corporate Award section, Hewlett Packard (HP) bagged the 'Top PC Vendor' award as it shipped 744,686 personal computers last year.

Ingram Micro won the 'Top Distributor' award with revenues of over Rs 6,800 crore (Rs 68 billion) and NIIT was judged as the 'Top IT Training Company'.

Cisco Systems won the 'Top Networking Vendor' award while IBM India emerged as the Top Server Company in India.

India's 'Biggest Software Exporter Award' was given to Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) which posted a growth of 33 per cent in revenues to cross Rs 18,000 crore (Rs 180 billion). TCS also won the 'Best Employer Award' for the year 2007. In IT and ITeSsector, vCustomer was ranked the 'Best BPO Employer' of the year.