Kunal Bahl of Snapdeal Bags Dataquest IT Person Award

12 Nov 2014, Bangalore: Kunal Bahl, co-founder and CEO of SnapDeal bagged the prestigious Dataquest IT Person award for 2104. Kunal was chosen for successfuly leveraging state of art IT and communications technologies to launch e-commerce marketplace Snapdeal and quickly making it India's fastest growing site with a valuation of over $ 2 billion. “This award will encourage me towards our vision for creating life changing experiences for 1 million small businesses in India” Kunal said as the first reaction to the award.

The Lifetime Achievement Award for 2014 went to Saurabh Srivastava, co-founder of NASSCOM, who was one of the main drivers behind the launch of NASSCOM in 1988, the body that played a key role in catapulting India as a software services giant. “I thank Dataquest for this recognition and Award, but let me tell you that I still have lots of things to do for building the ecosystem for start-ups to come with even bigger dreams”, Srivastava mentioned in his acceptance speech.

The Dataquest Pathbreaker Award went to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's digital and social media team for 2014 genereal elections that played an important role in the historical win for the Bhartiya Janta Party. In the acceptance speech, Dr Arvind Gupta, Head of the IT Cell, BJP said “The prime minister is using IT to reach out to the people of India, share the governments vision, and take their feedback for an inclusive governance”.

The Dataquest Jury's Special Award went to Arundhati Bhattacharya, Chairman, State Bank of India for some of the technology lead innovations for ensuring that banking becomes easy and safe for the common man, and millions of people who are not covered by the banks are reached and served. In her acceptnace speech Mrs Bhattacharya said “I am really honored to recieve this award, and it will motivate us to deploy and leverage technology to serve our customers better”.

Presenting the Dataquest awards, chief guest Mr NR Narayana Murthy, founder of Infosys, and himself the winner of Dataquest IT Person award in 1996, and Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007, said that “Dataquest has been doing a great service to Indian IT industry by recognising those who are bringing about a change by using technology”.

The awards were presented at a glittering ceremonry at CeBIT Bangalore, this evening. The winners were chosen after intense deliberations and debate by a jury of renowned industry leaders that included CP Gurnani, CEO and MD, TechMahindra; Harsh Chitale, CEO and MD of HCL Infosystems; Alok Ohrie, Managing Director, Dell India; Dinesh Malkani, president, Cisco – India & SAARC; S Ramasamy, Director IT, Indian Oil; Anil Chaudhry, Managing Director, Schneider India; Prof Surendra Prasad, ex-Director, IIT Delhi; and Pradeep Gupta, CMD, CyberMedia.

The evening also saw the presentation of Dataquest corporate awards awards for IT, and Voice&Data corporate awards for communications. These awards are given on fiscal year revenue performance based on the 2 surveys – DQTop20 and V&D100 - that these brands do every year. Both of these are the oldest and the most comprehensive surveys that cover almost 35 categories in IT and telecom. A summary of the survey was presented by the Group Editor of PC Quest & CIOL Thomas George.

The corporate award winners in the various product and services categories were as follows : A4 DMP and Ink SF Printers (Epson); Database & CRM (Oracle); SCM, BI and ERP (SAP); Middleware (IBM); PCs and Printer (HP); Servers, and Infrastructure Mngt Software(HP); Carrier Networking, Enterprise Active Networking, PBX, Desk Phones (Cisco); Test & Measurement (Keysight Technologies);Structured Cabling (TE Connectivity);Core & Access Equipment

(Ericsson); Datacards (Huawei); Tablets & Mobile Handsets (Samsung); Managed Sevices (Nokia Networks); Network Integration (Wipro) ; Power Solutions (Delta Electronics);

Telecom Towers (Indus Towers); OSS/BSS (Amdocs); Telecom Software, Solutions & Consulting (TCS); Fixed Line, and Fixed Broadband Services (BSNL); VSAT Services (Hughes Communications); Enterprise Services (Tata Communications); Wireless Broadband Services, Overall Internet Services, Mobile Services (Airtel); Pvt. University - Academic Excellence & Placements (Galgotias University)