HCL's Ajai Chaudhry is Dataquest 'Person of the Year 2007'

Cybermedia News Bureau

New Delhi: Ajai Chowdhry, Chairman and CEO of HCL Infosystems was named the
Dataquest 'IT Person of the Year 2007.' Infosys' NR Narayana Murthy was
felicitated with 'Lifetime Achievement Award,' and the Bhoomi project in
Karnataka bagged the Path-breaker award.

India's most respected achievement awards in the information technology
sector were given away, along with a dozen prestigious awards for the Top 10
manufacturers and IT service providers. Nandan Nilekani, Co-chairman of Infosys
and the Dataquest 'IT Person of the Year 2006, presented the 2007 award to HCL's
Chowdhry.

Chowdhry was honored for passionately focusing on the Indian domestic market
and believing in the potential of computer hardware manufacturing in India. He
had also pioneered in creating the home-user market for computers and was also
the first to recognize the user-side of convergence.

The Dataquest IT Lifetime achievement Award was conferred on Infosys'
co-chairman and chief mentor, NR Narayana Murthy for successfully building a
company that changed the rules of global IT services. Murthy had made Indians
proud of their nationality and India the epicenter of the software action.

TV Mohandas Pai, Member of the board and director, human resources, education
and research and administration, received the award on behalf of Murthy. Project
Bhoomi — an initiative by the Government of Karnataka for digitizing land
records across the State was recognized with the 'Path-breaker of the Year
2007' Award. The project, started in 1999, has so far touched the lives of 6.7
million farmers and other landowners across the south Indian State.

The Corporate Awards were given based on the various annual surveys that
Dataquest magazine conducted on the performance of the IT industry.
Hewlett-Packard bagged the Top PC Vendor Award as it shipped 744, 686 PCs last
year.

HP was also the unchallenged leader in the printing and imaging segment, with
greater market share than all other companies put together. Ingram Micro bagged
the top distributor award with revenues of more than Rs 6,800 crore. This was
Ingram Micro's first financial year after its merger with Tech Pacific when it
added new lines of business.

NIIT was honored as the top IT training company. It offers education across the
globe and posted net revenues of Rs 795 crore last fiscal. In the networking
segment, Cisco Systems maintained its monopoly as the top networking vendor with
81 per cent router market share and 73 per cent of the switches market.

IBM India too maintained its position as the top server company in India with
a market share of 34 per cent across the x86 and non-x86 range. With
acquisitions, large deals and new markets, Tata Consultancy Services posted a
growth of 33 per cent in revenues to cross Rs 18,000 crore, and registering an
impressive 87 percent growth.

TCS thus emerged as the India's biggest software exporter. The company also
bagged the best employer award for the year 2007 and thus becoming great place
to work, according to a Dataquest-IDC survey.

In the IT and ITeS sector, vCustomer was ranked No.1 and bagged the best BPO
employer award, and IIT-Kharagpur was adjudged as numero uno and becoming India's
top technology institutes that provide future leaders to Indian and global IT
industry.

The Dataquest-IDC survey found that IIT-Kharagpur had posted a significant
improvement in infrastructure and industry interface. The winners were chosen by
an eminent panel of experts comprising Nandan Nilekani, co-chairman of Infosys;
Alok Ohrie, CEO and MD of AMD; Dr Ganesh Natarajan, deputy chairman and MD of
Zensar Technologies; Dr Jai Menon, director (IT and Innovation), Bharti Airtel;
Revathi Kasturi, former MD of Novell West Asia; Rahul Bhasin, senior partner,
Barings Private Equity Partners; and Sanjeev Bhikchandani, CEO of Naukri.com.

Pradeep Gupta, Chairman of CyberMedia; Shyam Malhotra, Editor-in-Chief of
CyberMedia were also part of the selection panel.

The event also marked the 25th Anniversary of Dataquest and CyberMedia. The
Dataquest annual awards, now in its 15th year, have honored IT leaders like N
Vittal, Ashok Soota, Azim Premji, Shiv Nadar, Rajendra Panwar, Kiran Karnik,
Pramod Mahajan and S Ramadorai over the years.