Cyber Media celebrates 20th anniversary

Cyber Media India Ltd (CMIL), publisher of leading IT magazine Dataquest,
telecom magazine V&D, channel magazines like DQWeeks and DQ Channels India
and the end-user mags like C@H and PCQ, 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.

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