Datacraft is best Cisco SI in Asia

Datacraft India has bagged the "Best SI Partner of the Year for

Asia" by Cisco Systems at its annual partner summit at Orlando, USA. This

is the first time that an Indian company has received this award.

The award was given in recognition of Datacraft’s achievements, including

becoming India´s first and only Cisco Gold Partner, achieving the Cisco WLAN

specialization and the Cisco VPN Security specialization. In addition to this

Datacraft has been promoting and implementing new Cisco technologies like IP

contact center, IP telephony, secure VPN´s, and solutions based on Cisco’s

architecture for voice, video and integrated data).

"This award is a self-statement about our technical prowess and

expertise in network solutions," says Dilip Kumar, President of Datacraft

India. "It also demonstrates Cisco´s commendation of Datacraft´s total

commitment to the partnership and its highly focused support of Cisco’s new

world product strategy that aims to continuously improve the standard and

spectrum of the company’s offering."

Dilip also added that Datacraft will increasingly focus on value-added

services as part of its Millennium strategy. Currently its service to products

ratio is almost 20 percent. Dilip wants to increase this to 50 percent by 2003.

One step in this direction is its managed services center at Bangalore, which

has started its beta testing with three clients. The company hopes to

commercialize operations by the end of July 2002.

VINITA BHATIA, MUMBAI