Abraham Thomas
MD & CEO, IBM India
When Thomas joined IBM’s Singapore unit in 1986 as a trainee, little did he know that 14 years later, he would head the company in one of its most challenging markets—India. As MD and CEO, Thomas—an MBA from Singapore—oversees and manages IBM’s sales and marketing, services and exports business in India. For eight consecutive years, he made it to IBM’s Hundred Percent Club for exceeding his sales quota and was awarded IBM’s Asean and South Asia General Manager Award for ‘Outstanding Business Performance’ in 1997.

Arjun Malhotra
CEO, TechSpan
Born in Calcutta in 1949, Malhotra has studied at Doon School, IIT Kharagpur and Harvard Business School. And then Arjun Malhotra helped co-found one of India’s largest technology companies in 1976—HCL. He took over the US operations of the group in 1989, ran the HCL-HP joint venture in India in 1992 and consolidated and grew HCL Australasia operations in Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand. He left to found his own firm—TechSpan—in 1998, with funding from Goldman Sachs.

Ajai Chowdhry
chairman & CEO
HCL Infosystems
When HCL was founded in 1976, there were only 15 computers in all of India—so Chowdhry and his partners created the ‘computer culture’ in the country. Chowdhry has been largely responsible for driving international growth at HCL Insys. He set up HCL’s operations in Singapore in 1980 and since then, has covered South Asian Markets, including Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong and Indonesia. Chowdhry took over the reins in 1994 and has successfully transitioned the company from a hardware-only focus to a premier technology integration company.

Arun Jain
CMD, Polaris Software Lab
Jain is a first-generation entrepreneur who promoted Nucleus Software Group in 1986, with the aim of creating world-class services company. In 1993, Jain started Polaris Software Lab with development centers in Chennai and Noida. Since then, Polaris has carved a niche for itself in the BFSI segment, and is one of the fastest-growing IT companies in India.

Pravin R Gandhi
Pravinbhai, as he is called, is a stalwart in Indian IT. He has always been a man of various occupations. He co-founded one of India’s early IT companies, Hinditron Computers.He was significantly involved in getting DEC (of minicomputer fame) to India. His insight in to the dynamics of the technology business has endured the test of times. Down to earth and brash, Pravinbhai wields tremendous influence over the industry. In his latest avatar, he is part of $30-million angel fund, Infinity Technology Investments.

NR Narayana Murthy
Few remember him now as the first designer of the ‘Basic Interpreter’ implemented in India. Or as the man who was part of a team that built the country’s first multi-user OS. Which is as it should be. Murthy is listed here for creating a globally-respected Indian company. It had little to do with Infosys being the first to be listed on Nasdaq, and more to do with what Murthy projected for himself and his company—openness, honesty and savvy.

Vinay Deshpande
chairman and CEO, Encore Software
Even though he is mostly associated with the Simputer, 54-year-old Vinay Deshpande, a Stanford alumnus, is also the co-founder of Processor Systems and PSI Data Systems. He also co-founded Encore Software in 1990. He has been a member of the R&D working group of the Prime Minister’s Information Technology Task Force set up in 1997-1998. The World Economic Forum has also named him as one of the ‘100 Technology Pioneers’ for 2001 & 2002, for being engaged in the most innovative technology areas.

Ajit Balakrishnan
chief executive officer, rediff.com
Ajit Balakrishnan is the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Rediff.com India. Balakrishnan is also a director of Rediffusion-Dentsu, Young & Rubicam Ltd, where he has served since March 1993, and a director of Rediffusion Advertising Private Ltd and PSI Data Systems Ltd. He holds a BSc degree in Physics from Kerala University and a post-grad management diploma from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta.

Sanjiv Sidhu
founder, chairman & CEO, i2 Technologies
What made Sanjiv Sidhu found i2 Technologies in 1988, when he was about to be made V-P of Texas Instruments? The answer lies in his firm belief that information systems can greatly help in arriving at intelligent decisions. Today, Sidhu has established a $ 200-million technology company that boasts of an array of blue chip clients like IBM, 3M and many more. Probably one of the most significant contributions made by Sidhu is his visionary thinking—that supply chain solutions over the Net and its impact on business efficiencies cannot be overstated.

Ashank Desai
CMD, Mastek
One of the founder members of Mastek, he has played a pivotal role in making it a Rs 265-crore global IT services company. His vision and leadership abilities have helped Mastek develop strong export markets in the US, Europe and Asia-Pacific. He was also one of the co-founders and past-chairman of Nasscom and has been involved in all major initiatives taken by the apex body in India.

Arun Netravalli
president, Bell Labs
An alumnus of IIT Bombay, today he is President of the world’s largest R&D organization, to become the night leader at Bell Labs (the R&D unit of Lucent). Earlier, he was executive vice-president of Lucent Technologies and has been with Bell Labs for the last 27 years. He is also a known expert in the field of multimedia communications and the one who pioneered digital images and video compression technology. His work on high-definition television has earned him an Emmy. He has authored 140 technical papers, co-authored three books and holds 60 patents in the area of human interfaces, picture processing and digital television.

Ashok Soota
Soota began his career with the Shriram Group in 1965 and rose to become CEO of Shriram Refrigeration. By the time he left, he had turned around a company that had been in the red for four years. In 1984, he became CEO of the Rs 7-crore Wipro Information Technology. By the time he left in 1999, he’d brought in many changes that triggered runaway growth. The entrepreneurial bug caught him and he co-founded MindTree Consulting—an e-biz firm.

Bharat Goenka
This is a refreshing story—even an unusual one. Shyam Sunder Goenka, BCom, manufacturer of spare-parts for textile mills, traditional Marwari businessman and father. Bharat Goenka, BSc, son. One day, father told son that if he could make a software accounting package that even he could use, they probably had a winner on their hands. The son did just that and the father-son duo formed Peutronics in 1986—now called Tally. In the years since, Tally has held strong and grown to the extent of almost becoming a generic name. It is even included in the curriculum of the Indian Institute of Chartered Accountants for students taking up their articleship.

Ashok Jhunjhunwala
Jhunjhunwala is an authority in technology, telecommunications, computer networks and fibre optics. Over the years, through sheer hard work, dedication, passion and creativity, he has explored the worlds of engineering and technology and championed the cause of technology and innovation. Chennai-based Polaris Software Lab recented inducted Jhunjhunwala, who is head of the department of electrical engineering, at IIT Chennai, onto its board.

Avtar Saini
director, Intel
In late 1999, Avtar Saini was appointed to head the South Asia operations of Intel. He has been with Intel for the last 20 years, having started out as micro architect and logic designer on the Intel 486 processor. In 1989, he co-led the Pentium processor design team, where he managed the chip design and its eventual ramp-up into volume production. He holds seven patents for his work in microprocessor design, and started Intel’s India development center in Bangalore.

Asim Ghosh
managing director, Hutchison Max Telecom
Asim Ghosh, as managing director of Hutchison Max Telecom, is responsible for the overall business and spearheads the company’s growth and leadership position. He has held senior executive position with Hutchison Whampoa in Hong Kong, managing a group of 13 consumer goods business units with operators in Hong Kong, China and South-East Asia in the AS Watson Division. Ghosh has had successful stints in America, Canada and the Far East earlier.

Azim Premji
He left college midway and came home from Stanford to take over his father’s oils and pulses business on his death. He grew that into a more than Rs 3,000-crore IT business—among the best-known Indian IT brands abroad. But it’s not merely for his business acumen that he is renowned. What Premji is and will be remembered most for is his unceasing vision of Wipro as primarily a technology and IPR-driven company.

Dr Vinay Bharat Ram
president, DCM Group
He came from Harvard to join the quality control department of the textile division of Delhi Cloth Mills, run by Lala Shri Ram. Then he went on to become one of the first to venture into computers. He told Dataquest in 1988—"We were the first to venture into computers in the 1970s by introducing the first desktop calculator". That division was spun of to become DCM-DP. Unlike his peers, his decision to move into the industry was not one of passion—but an assessed business move.

CN Ram
CIO, HDFC
An electrical engineer from IIT Chennai and an alumnus of IIM-A, Ram joined HDFC eight years ago as head of IT. Previous to HDFC, he worked with the Bank of America for 12 years. In this fast-growing domestic and private bank in the country, he set up and manages the entire IT backbone, including customer services and operations.

Dr Ravindran
It took courage back then, to come back to India and dream to be an entrepreneur. But he did just that. Born in 1942, schooled at Ottapalam in Kerala, Dr Ravindran did his BE from Trivandram and went to Stanford, where he met Vinay Deshpande. They returned home—very few did at the time—to set up Processor Systems India. This is for the man who dared to dream in the wrong place at the wrong time. And got a whole industry going...

Balu Doraisamy
president, Hewlett-Packard India
In his earlier role, Balu was the managing director of Compaq Computer India Ltd since June 1999. He led Compaq India to be the #1 IT vendor’s position in the domestic market, with a leadership position in servers, storage, desktop PCs, notebooks, workstations and mission-critical support services. That success has seen him become president in the merged entity—the new HP—in India.

Bhaskar Pramanik
MD, Sun Microsystems India
An alumnus of IIT Kanpur, Bhaskar’s first job was with Nelco, where he sold calculators for Rs 50,000 before moving to Blue Star in 1982. When Digital Equipment Corp came to India in 1987, Bhaskar joined as its first V-P (sales and marketing). Personally, says Bhaskar, "that was the turning point for me". In Digital, he rose to become director (enterp-rise sales) for APAC before he left to join Sun Microsystems.

Dr Raj Reddy,
Dean (Computer Science Institute), Carnegie Mellon University
Forty two years ago, he left India with a BE in Civil Engineering from the Guindy Engineering College, Madras. Today, he is among the most respected names in the US in the field of robotics and artificial intelligence. Dr Reddy was founding director of the Robotics Institute from 1979 to 1991 and is now Dean of the Computer Science institute at Carnegie Mellon University. He is also co-chair of the US President’s Information Technology Advisory Committee.

Chandrababu Naidu
Pramod Mahajan once said of Chandrababu Naidu –"he’s the man who taught politicians that Powerpoint could mean something other than three holes in a wall socket." Naidu is listed here for not just being a savvy politician who got on to the tech bandwagon when the time was right; he is here for truly believing in what technology can do for the country, for untiringly spreading that message and acting on it at the risk of political backlash.

Dr Roddam Narasimhan
Dr Narasimhan has many firsts to his name. The two he’s remembered for most—he was the first president of the Computer Society of India (CSI) where he served four terms from 1965 to 1969. He was the first Chairman of Computer Maintenance Corporation (CMC) where he helped usher in the new era of the Indian IT industry after IBM’s exit. With a degree in Telecommunication Engineering from Madras University in 1947, he went to the USA. for an MS in Electrical Engineering from CalTech and a PhD in Mathematics from Indiana.

Deepak Puri
MD, Moser Baer
He heads the country’s only storage media manufacturer and one of the top 5 optical media companies in the world. As a mechanical engineer, he started Moser Baer in 1983 in technical collaboration with Swiss firm Moser Baer AG, which was into time solutions. Soon after, he saw potential in storage data. The rest is history.

Deepak B Phatak
Call Prof Deepak B Phatak the most resourceful teacher in Indian IT. He served as the first dean of resource development at IIT Bombay. His brief was to raise funds for the institute and he did it mighty well through his network of students in the US. So much so, that he set up a separate school for IT and got it funded. He is currently the head of the Kanwal Rekhi School of Information Technology, IIT Bombay, a school complete with a business incubator and Internet-enabled distance learning.

Dewang Mehta
former president, Nasscom
Dewang played a key role in putting the Indian IT sector on the world map. From CA to the chief of Nasscom, his hard lobbying tactics paid off, making Nasscom one of the most respected industry forums in the country. He deserves credit for the events that led to the I-T exemption for software exporters and software reproduction legislation, and excise & sales tax exemption from a numbers of state governments.

Dr Homi Jahangir Bhabha
Yes. this is an unusual name to find on this list. When one thinks of Dr Bhabha, one mostly thinks of India’s early nuclear program days. But it is not for that that Dr Bhabha finds his name on this list. Not even for the Bhabha Electron Scattering phenomenon. Or for the setting up the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. He finds his name here because in 1966, he headed the first-ever committee on informatics that would define the course of the Indian IT industry for well over a decade. The report suggested the imperatives for an indigenous Informatics industry for a self-reliant nuclear defense program.

Dr N Seshagiri
He is among the few bureaucrats remembered for his contribution to liberalizing the industry. First through the New Computer Policy of 1984, then the Software Development and Export Policy of 1986 and finally as member-convener of the PM’s National Task Force on Information Technology in 1998, Dr Seshagiri also helped conceive the idea and coordinated the design and implementation of NICNET.

Dr Narinder Singh Kapany
chairman, K2 Optronics
He is the father of fiber optics, the man that Fortune magazine one of the seven ‘Unsung Heroes’ in its ‘Businessmen of the Century’ issue. Born in India, educated in England and working in the US for the past many decades, Dr Kapany invented fiber optics—"the wonder material"—in 1954. That’s the technology that is now used from endoscopy devices to high-capacity telephone lines and has changed the medical, communication and business worlds.

Dr Srinivasan Ramani
Enthusiasm. That’s the one word that defines the man who helped create the first e-mail in the country. The service was developed to demonstrate India’s capabilities in data networking. He and fellow scientists pioneered the Internet age in India through the Ernet—a network connecting the education and research institutions and conducted among the earliest experiments in satellite communications.

Gururaj ‘Desh’ Deshpande
Born in Dharwar in 1950, he went on to become what one might call a "serial entrepreneur". He co-founded Coral Network Corporation in 1988 in the US. He went against the nay-sayers to set up Cascade Communications in a market dominated by Cisco and sold the company to Ascend in 1996 for $3.7 billion. By that time, 72% of all Internet traffic was coursing through Cascade’s products. A year later, anticipating the optical networking boom, he co-founded Sycamore Networks that would help revolutionize the backbone of the public network. His inspiration? A framed $26.95-check that was all he got from his first entrepreneurial venture. A reminder to him, he once said, that "If you really believe in it, you’re going to make it happen".

Sugata Mitra
senior vice-president (R&D), NIIT
This 50-year-old physicist-turned-computer-education-expert came to the forefront with the internationally-acclaimed ‘hole in the wall’ experiment. The key observation of this experiment was that children constructed their learning without external interference, something that Dr Mitra calls ‘minimally invasive education’. If proven, it could mean a complete makeover in the way children are taught computers. He has also designed and implemented several novel computer applications in India.

FC Kohli
former deputy chairman, TCS
Dr Fakir Chand Kohli, former deputy chairman of Tata Consultancy Services, was awarded the Padma Bhushan early this year, for his contribution to the software industry. He is often known as the ‘Father of the Indian SW industry’. He obtained a BSc (Hons) Electrical Engineering Degree from Queen’s University, Canada, and MS Electrical Engineering Degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA. He is instrumental in building TCS and guiding it to its current standing.

Harish Mehta
It was Harish Mehta who, along with Saurabh Srivastava, Prakash Ahuja and Shashi Bhatnagar, co-founded Nasscom, and brought in Dewang Mehta—the young CA and computer graphics enthusiast—to head the industry association. The rest is history. One of the early IT entrepreneurs in the country, Mehta headed Hinditron which brought in Digital, the first MNC IT firm to arrive in India, post-IBM’s exit.

Kanwal Rekhi
Born in Rawalpindi, Pakistan in 1945, Kanwal moved with his family to India during the partition. With a BTech from IIT Bombay and an MS from Michigan Tech University, he was among the first new-generation Indians to land up at Silicon Valley and make a fortune. He co-founded Excelan in 1982 and moved to Novell when the two companies merged in 1989. He subsequently helped set up TiE—The Indus Entrepreneurs—and has been involved with over 50 start-ups.

Jay Pullur
founder and CEO, Pramati Technologies
Pramati was one of the first in India to launch Java-based products, and Pullur has worked with Wipro for 10 years. Jay holds a degree in Computer Science from IIT Kanpur. Pramati was the first in India to license J2EE and among only three picked to exhibit Enterprise Java Bean technology at Java One in 1999. R&D in the Java community process has helped Pramati deliver EJB 2.0 server technology to the market early.

Kumar Malavalli
Considered one of the originators of fiber channel technology, Malavalli chairs the ANSI Fiber Channel Switch Committee and the FC Assocation Technology Committee, which have helped shape standards in this area. Born in Mysore, he did his engineering from Dusseldorf and moved to Toronto. After two decades of work in companies like ITT, Canstar and HP, and then, one summer day in 1995, a venture capitalist called Seth Neimann met him at a shopping center, offered him $1.4 million and Brocade Communication!

Nandan Nilekani
He’s been the quintessential road warrior. The man who always stood one step behind Narayana NR Murthy, ran the operations that no outsider ever got to see, ran the business, made that sale. Last year though, was the time for Nilekani to come out of the shadows and take over as CEO of the company. He still remains the road warrior, though—flying from continent to continent closing sales. His job—to keep Infy growing in one of the toughest business environments.

KV Kamath
If one looks at KVK’s five-year record as the chief of the country’s fastest-growing financial institution, there’s no parallel. A veteran at ICICI, he transformed it into an agile organization, entered new segments in the financial sector, and brought it up to global reckoning in terms of competitve-ness and vision. And it was through technology that KVK brought about a large part of this transformation. A strong proponent of the New Economy, Kamath pioneered the initiative to promote a tech company, a venture fund and a string of Internet companies.

N Vittal
chief vigilance commissioner
He took over as the secretary of the DoE in 1990 and changed the rules of the game. The software industry will remember him for the $400-million challenge. They will also remember him for what he once said and did—"The Indian software export miracle happened," he said, "because something ungovernment-like happened. The Department of Electronics started breaking rules to create a freer environment, which dramatically changed the scenario!" From there, he moved to DoT, where he is remembered for his privatization attempts.

Maj Gen A Balasubrahmanian AVSM (retd)
This AVSM winner, with 34 years in the Indian Army, will be most remembered for being the founding secretary of the Computer Society of India. He also served as president of CSI from 1969 to 1972. In recognition of his services, he won the ‘Silver Core’ from the International Federation of Information processing.

Navdeep S Sooch
co-founder of Silicon Labs
Known in the Silicon Valley as ‘Nav’ Sooch, this Amritsar-born Stanford alumnus prominently figures in Fortune’s ‘America’s 40 Richest Under 40’ list and is the co-founder president & chief executive officer of Silicon Labs. His personal worth is estimated at around $186 million. Before founding Silicon Laboratories, he held various positions at Crystal Semiconductor/Cirrus Logic and at AT&T Bell Labs.

NK Patni
CEO, Patni Computer Systems
Naren Patni holds a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has over 25 years’ experience in the IT industry and has been a consultant to US Trust Co of New York and Arthur D. Little. He is instrumental in initiating and developing the outsourcing business model for the software industry in India.

YS Rajan
leading scientist and author
A scientist and technologist, YS Rajan is partnering with leaders in the industry and science establishments to accelerate technological competence and create wealth for Indian citizens. He is executive director, Technology Information Forecasting and Assessment Council, which looks into technology and assesses what can be made commercial with a goal toward largescale commercialization. Recently, he took over as scientific secretary to the principal scientific adviser. Before joining TIFAC/DST in 1988, he was with the Indian Space Program since 1964. He recently authored a book, named Empowering Indians. TIFAC outlined the technology vision of India till 2020. He has to his credit the distinction of co-authoring a book with APJ Abdul Kalam, President of India.

Pawan Kumar
chairman and CEO, Vmoksha
One of the oldest hands in the Indian IT Industry, this IIT Kanpur alumni joined TCS in 1974 and is credited with setting up the Software Maintenance Group there. After spending nearly two decades with TCS, he moved out—only to head organizations like Fujitsu-ICIM, IBM Global Services India and DSQ Software. Subsequently, the entrepreneurial bug bit him and he launched Vmoksha.

Prem Shivdasani
managing director, ICIM
Coming back from USA is not a recent phenomena. Prem Shivdasani did that way back in the 80s and went on to become an icon of the Indian IT industry. Apart from being the CEO of ICIM, the largest computer Indian company in the mid-80s, Shivdasani has to be credited to lay the foundations of the Indian IT industry. He was the founder member for MAIT and then later on for Nasscom.

Pramod Mahajan
Union minister for IT, telecommunications and parliamentary affairs
In Year 1999, Mahajan was given the task of heading the newly-created IT department. He helped the Indian IT sector strengthen its roots and also helped India maintain key alliance with Asian leaders like Goh Chok Tong, Dae-Jung and Natsagiya Bagabandi. Along with building a resurgent regional identity, he also pushed forward path-breaking legislation. He has networked extensively with politicians, bureaucrats, academicians, businessmen and scientists.

Pradeep Sindhu
CTO and founder, Juniper Networks
Legendary venture capitalist Vinod Khosla calls Sindhu "tech’s biggest unsung hero". The Juniper founder expanded the routers’ capabilities, making Juniper the only company so far to seriously threaten Cisco and permanently alter the Internet’s backbone technology. He founded Juniper in 1996 and was considered crazy to take aim at Cisco. But 5 years later Juniper grabbed 30% of the high-end router market. Prior to Juniper he was former Xerox PARC principal scientist where he designed tools for VLSI and high-speed interconnects for shared memory microprocessors.

Pramod Bhasin
president, GE Capital
Arguably the most important man in the BPO space in India is Bhasin. GE has 20,000 employees working in back-end offices in India. He says the BPO industry in India can have another 45,000 trained students enter it. Currently GE handles 450 processes across 30 different businesses. Bhasin is a CA from Thomson McLintock & Co, London and holds a BCom degree.

Prof Sadagopan
founder-director, IIIT (Bangalore)
The founder-director of the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore he has taught for more than two decades at IIT Kanpur and IIM Bangalore. From 1973-1976, he moved to Purdue University, USA for his master’s and doctoral degrees before returning to India to teach at IIT-K. Prof Sadagopan has taught full terms at Rutgers University (New Jersey), IIT-M and AIT (Bangkok). He has authored two textbooks—Management Information Systems and ERP: A Managerial Perspective. His name figures among Marquis’ ‘Who’s Who in the World’ since 1997.

Prof HN Mahabala
One of the pioneers of Indian IT education, 66-year-old Prof HN Mahabala obtained his PhD in Electrical Engineering from the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. In 1965, Mahabala initiated the computer science program at IIT Kanpur—a first in India. He has taught over 25 courses in computer science and set up a national computer center at IIT Chennai.

Prof N Balakrishnan – Balki
chairman (information scientist & services)
Indian Institute of Science
Prof N Balakrishnan has made significant contributions to the creation of the Centre for Microprocessor Applications, the National Centre for Science Information, the Supercomputer Education and Research Centre at the Indian Institute of Science. He was associate chairman of the Centre for Scientific and Industrial Consultancy Centre. He is currently chairman of the Supercomputer Education and Research Centre and also divisional chairman of Information Sciences & Services. He has contributed to over 120 publications and international journals and among his areas of research is numerical electromagnetics.

Rajesh Uppal
general manager (IT)
Maruti Udyog Limited
Rajesh Uppal is the IT chief of the country’s largest automaker. A mechanical engineer, Uppal joined Maruti in 1985. Since then, he has been working in the IT division at MUL. Joining the division as an executive, he today heads it as general manager. During his stint at MUL, Uppal has been witness to the nascent wing growing in stature and reach to become what it is today. Before joining Maruti Udyog, Uppal had worked with Bhel in the public sector unit’s IT department. Today, 60% of the company’s business is conducted online and 260 dealers are linked to their WAN.

Rajesh Jain
Rajesh Jain made it to the cover story of the February 2000 issue of TIME—"Rajesh Jain taught Asia what Silicon Valley has known for a long time: going public may be the most celebrated way to cash in on the Internet, but selling out can be a sure-fire moneymaker." And he got $115 million for selling out India’s first portal site—IndiaWorld—to Sify in November 1999. A year before that, Jain set up NetCore, a Linux-based messaging software company. NetCore is now transforming itself into a company called as Emergic.

Raj Saraf
chairman & MD, Zenith Computer
Saraf is an LLB from the University of Mumbai. He singlehandedly ventured into the arena of electronic components—pioneering Zenith Semiconductors. Without external help—financial or otherwise—Saraf incorporated his dream, Zenith Computers, in 1980. Zenith has come a long way from the sale of integrated circuits to assembling and then to its own brand. Saraf has played a key role in taking PCs to the common man, with dramatic price slashes being his strongest weapon—one that makes him a formidable adversary in the PC space.

Rajiv Bapna
founder, Amkette
Rajiv Bapna, an alumnus of IIT Delhi, founded Amkette in 1986. The company was the first-ever domestic manufacturer of floppy diskettes in in India. In a short span of time, Amkette gained a strong name in the Indian market due to Bapna’s strong focus on precision manufacturing, customer service and distribution policies. In time, Amkette has diversified into a computer essentials company with a range of 150 products encompassing 15 categories. Bapna is also responsible for creating one of the largest IT distribution network in the country.

B Ramalinga Raju
Ramalinga Raju the soft-spoken son of an agriculturist who developed a hard nose for the IT business. Raju jumped into IT as a hobby, quickly realized its growth potential and has today built it into a Rs 1,700-crore giant. He started one of the first—if not the first—true outsourcing deal with Deere & Co in the US and set off a whole new phenomenon. In 1999 he won the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of Year (Services) Award.

Rajiv Gandhi
They called him the JFK of India—the man who took a different, young, modern image of India to the world. They called him the "Laptop Prime Minister" (he carried a 386 Toshiba). Later, they called him other names like "Computerji". But he’s remembered here not just for the image he projected outside, but the messages he sent within. He believed in the Indian IT dream long before Indian programmers were flocking to training institutes and long before Indian software even looked like it had a future internationally; for his various technology missions and for setting up C-DAC that gave India its first indigenous supercomputer. But most of all, he’s remembered for the New Computer Policy, 1984, announced within 19 days of his coming to power—that opened the floodgates.

Ramesh D Grover
managing director, CMS
He learned very early in life how to rise over adverse situations and emerge a winner when he managed to survive and successfully migrate to India from Lahore in 1947 soon after the partition. After joining BITS Pilani on a scholarship, he soon started assembling radios for co students to fund his study. He took up his first job at L&T but quit it after eight months to join IBM as a trainee engineer. In his decade long stint there he went on to become its national technical support manager. His big opportunity came when IBM decided to exit India and some worried customers suggested that he start a maintenance company and that they would suport him. It worked!

Rajendra S Pawar
chairman, NIIT
A distinguished alumnus of IIT Delhi, Pawar co-founded NIIT along with batchmate Vijay Thadani and with support from Shiv Nadar. Pawar, a visionary and developer of HR potential, has played a role in instituting quality processes and Crosby’s CDMS at NIIT. He is interested in foreseeing the trends and crucial directions in the deployment of IT for quantum change in organization effectiveness.

Sanjeev Bhikchandani
The pioneer in the Web-enabled recruitment business, this 39-year-old IIM Ahmedabad exponent founded naukri.com in 1997 before the dot-com wave hit Indian shores. Even as several others recruitment websites entered and exited this space, naukri.com remains one of India’s few profitable Internet businesses and projects sales revenue for financial 2002-03 at Rs 10 crore. During his 16 years in the industry, Bhikchandani has worked with Lintas India and SmithKline Beecham, before "being bitten by the entrepreneural bug".

S Ramadorai
chief executive officer, Tata Consultancy Services
Beginning his career with TCS as a programmer, Ramadorai rose through the ranks and was given the charge of setting up TCS’ operations in the US in 1975. He began with New York and that network has since grown to over 50 offices throughout the country. Since taking over as CEO, he has focussed on building relationships with large corporations and academic institutions, planning and directing technology development and acquisitions and overseeing the company’s R& activities.

Raman Roy
president and chief executive officer, Wipro Spectramind
As president and chief executive officer of Wipro Spectramind, Raman Roy was responsible for the company’s strategic direction and is the key driving force of the company’s mission and business philosophy. 45-year-old Raman is regarded as the pioneer and "guru" of the IT-enabled services business out of India, having played a pivotal role in proving India as a locale for remote processing and has successfully delivered servicing solutions.

Sabeer Bhatia
entrepreneur
He was India’s first IT poster boy—who made greenbacks by playing hardball with the world’s richest man. After selling Hotmail for about $390 million in Microsoft stock, he returned to his entrepreneurial ways because he did not want to be called ‘Mr Hotmail’ for the rest of his life. His fall from grace came with the demise of aarzoo.com, which was a casualty of the dot-com bust. He has floated NavinMail, which offers voice-based services that allow users to send voice messages.

Sam Pitroda
CEO, WorldTel
They called it the ‘Great Technology Honeymoon’—his and Rajiv Gandhi’s—that led to the setting up of the Center for the Development of Telematics in India and his appointment as Gandhi’s technology adviser. Against one of the most public oppositions in the history of Indian technology by bureaucrats of all hues, he launched the Rural Automatic Exchanges (RAX) project, that brought the PCO revolution to India. Pitroda launched his own company, Wesom, in 1974 in Chicago, which he sold to Rockwell International six years later. After his return to the US, he took over as CEO of WorldTel, which helps develop and finance telecom in developing countries.

Sanjeev Aggarwal
CEO, Daksh
e-Services
When he decided to quit as CEO of 3Com India, he didn’t join the dot-com gold rush. Instead, he ventured into IT-enabled services—specifically CRM—as his experience had taught him that most online transactions are abandoned because of inadequate customer support. And in two years’ time, he not only built a 2,300-people-strong team, he also created a highly customer-centric firm with a focus on delivering customer service—a fact that was recognized by Ernst & Young, which have him the ‘Entrepreneur of the Year Award’.

Shailendra Gupta
Group CEO, Tech Pacific Holdings
In 1996, when Tech Pacific invested into Godrej & Boyce and started Godrej Pacific Technology in India, nobody thought that the venture would become big. But it did, thanks primarily due to Gupta, the man who headed this company as CEO since its inception and implemented the Tech Pacific business model and management systems in the Indian environment. In 1999, Tech Pacific bought full equity from Godrej & Boyce and the company became Tech Pacific (India) Ltd, a fully-owned subsidiary with Gupta as managing director. Tech Pacific is a top-tier distributor in India and posted revenues of Rs 1,676 crore for fiscal 2001-02.

Satish Naralkar
Satish Naralkar has spent 20 years in the IT industry with companies like IBM and CMC, but his stint as the
CIO of NSE for five years since inception fetched him his real glory. In 1994, his brief was to architect a new stock exchange for the country using technology. And he delivered well, with NSE having many firsts in technology and technology practices to its credit—the world’s largest satellite-based trading network, business continuity planning, outsourcing, Internet-based online trading, and much more. Since 1999, Naralkar has been heading NSE.IT, a technology subsidiary carved out of the National Stock Exchange.

Vijay Bhatkar
chairman, ETH Research Lab
He is the father of Indian supercomputing. As the then executive director of Center for Development of Advanced Computing, he gave India’s its first supercomputer—PARAM 8000—in 1991 . And he did it in a record time of three years. It was the most resoundingly proud retort to the US, which had then refused to let Cray sell its supercomputer to India. Bhatkar went on to build PARAM 10000 in 1998, one of the world’s largest supercomputers, propelling India into the group of elite five nations that possess this technology. He is also credited with nurturing the GIST multilingual technology which made possible the use and co-existence of all Indian languages along with English on standard computers and the setting up of C-DAC’s well-known Advanced Computing Training School. He has authored/edited eight books and over 80 research publications in supercomputing, artificial intelligence and distributed computer control. In 2000, the government awarded him the Padmashri.

Shashi Ullal
former president and MD, HECL
Ullal worked for 42 years with the Indian IT industry, and was the first to take on the challenge of a new industry—the VSAT segment—and assumed office as president and managing director of Hughes Escorts Communications in July 1995. He developed this industry segment in India, one because of which his company maintains the early entrant advantage. Previous to Hughes, Ullal was with IBM for 19 years, and other major assignments were with DCM Data Products, Hewlett-Packard division of Blue Star Ltd, Modi Olivetti and Alcatel Modi. As president of the VSAT Service Providers’ Association, he also raised the VSAT issue to facilitate access to Ku and C bands and foreign satellite connectivity. He is a member of the Telecom Committee of Ficci, Assocham and CII.

Sirjang (Jugi) Lal Tandon
CEO & chairman, Celetron
One of the earliest immigrants from India to Silicon Valley, he founded the Tandon Corporation in 1975, producing magnetic recording heads for floppy disk drives and becoming a leading producer of floppy disk drives. Prior to 1975, Jugi had worked at IBM, Memorex and Pertec. For his achievements in technology and business, he was also awarded an honorary doctorate degree overseas.

Shiv Nadar
25 years ago, when Shiv Nadar quit DCM to form Hindustan Computers Ltd in a one-room tenement, little did he realize that he would pioneer the growth of IT in India in every sphere—hardware, software and networking communications. Also that, in the process of running HCL, he and his company would be become the incubators for India’s leading IT professionals and entrepreneurs. Today, he has moved on to the software side, with HCL Technologies, to make it amongst the top 10 Indian IT companies.

Sivasankaran
Sterling Computers
Sivasankaran launched the Siva PC at an unbelievable price of Rs 29,000 and took the bottom out of the market. That was to become a habit with Siva—he did the same in 1997—till he eventually faded out of the PC scene altogether.

SR Balasubramanian
chief information officer, Hero Honda
He is considered the person who turned IT cynics into IT believers within Hero Honda. With 27 years’ experience in the field of IT, starting from Indian Oil Corp to AF Ferguson & Company, Balasubramanian joined Hero Honda Motors in 1990. Back then, he was involved in IT implementation, devising new IT policies and coping with the resistance to IT implementation. After a two-year break, he re-joined Hero Honda and helped install structured LAN systems and WAN links, connecting 21 locations and manufacturing plants. Employees were soon eager to be part of the network and the culture changed—and that made using SAP much easier. As things improved, Hero Honda made increased revenues and faster audits—thanks in part to Balasubramanian.

Suhas Patil
chairman emeritus, co-founder and director, Cirrus Logic
A true visionary, Patil co-founded Cirrus Logic with Michael Hackworth in 1984. Today, Cirrus Logic is a leading manufacturer of advanced integrated circuits for multimedia, communications and mass storage in personal computers. Born in Jamshedpur, Patel received his degree in electronics and electronics communication from IIT in 1965 and went on to get his PhD in electrical engineering from MIT. Subsequently, he taught at MIT and then moved to the University of Utah. Later, he founded VLSI Group and Patil Systems in 1981.

Suresh Rajpal
When HP entered India, the government had all sorts of rules, licenses and regulations. The person who helped manage all that and give HP a headstart toward becoming one of the largest IT companies of India was Suresh Rajpal. He is the man who launched HP in India and took it to over $200 million in revenues during his tenure. Also, at the height of his career in 1999, he quit to start his own venture—e-Capital Solutions.

Team Samsung
A success story of 31 employees managing an over Rs 1,200-crore business—that’s Team Samsung. With the highest-per-employee productivity of nearly Rs 40 crore per employee, Team Samsung has leveraged the channel to form the largest IT peripherals company. Other achievements include crossing the 3-million-monitors mark by October 2002 to capture 52.5% of the Indian color monitor market. The company has set up a manufacturing unit with a 4-million installed capacity, even as the entire monitor demand in India is pegged at 2.5 million units annually.

Sunil Bharti Mittal
chairman & MD, Bharti Enterprises
From a cycle parts manufacturing business that he started in 1976 with borrowed capital of Rs 20,000, Mittal has come a long way to head Bharti Group, whose flagship company Bharti Tele-Ventures is India’s leading private sector provider of telecommunications services. Under his stewardship, not only has Touchtel become India’s first private sector telephone service provider to cross the 300,000-mark, Bharti is also the first telecom firm to cross the 2-million mobile subscriber mark. Besides, Bharti rolled out IndiaOne—the country’s first private international long-distance service leading to sharp drops in STD and ISD rates. BusinessWeek named him ‘One of the Top Entrepreneurs’ for Year 2000 and a ‘Star of Asia’ for Year 2001.

Veer Sagar
CEO, TCG Software Services (India)
He is an industry veteran in the true sense—with over 21 years’ experience in the information technology space and over 16 years at the helm of various organizations. After starting his career at Dunlop, he moved to ICIM in 1984. Under Sagar’s "unobtrusive and friendly" style of functioning, ICIM continued to flourish. In 1989, he left ICIM to join DCM Data Systems as its president and CEO. Veer Sagar is remembered for successfully turning around the ailing DCM Data Systems. It was under his leadership that the company launched Cosmos/10, the world’s first i486-based system, and in April 1990, the company bagged a $11-million order from the United States—then the largest Indian software export order.

V Rajaraman
IBM professor, Jawaharlal Nehru Center for Advanced Scientific Research
He returned from the US at a time when computer education wasn’t even on the horizon in India. As an academician, he built that horizon. He mooted and started the first-ever under-graduate course in computer science at IIT Kanpur, in the face of stiff resistance—which came because there weren’t even any books available on computers at the time. So Prof Rajaraman took the easy way out (!)—he wrote them—a good 15 of them, actually. If the origins of this industry lie in the education we received, then he is remembered as the guru who helped Indian computer pros grow. Prof Rajaraman has also been in the faculty of various prestigious institutes like IIT Kanpur, IISc Bangalore, Universities of Wisconsin, California and Berkely. He has also been a visiting IBM Research Fellow at the Systems Development Institute, Canberra. In 1997, Dataquest gave him ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’ for contribution to IT. He landed the Padma Bhushan in 1998.

Vinod Khosla
general partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
Forbes calls him "One of the Movers and Shakers of the Tech World". An influential VC of Silicon Valley today, 47-year-old Vinod Khosla is best known for co-founding Sun Microsystems, the largest corporation founded by an Indian. He also set up Daisy Systems, which was one of the first companies to go after the computer-aided design software market. An IIT Delhi and Stanford Graduate School of Busines alumni, he is on the boards of Asera, Corio Inc, Juniper Networks, Redback, QWEST Communications and Zaplet Inc.

Vyomesh Joshi
executive V-P (imaging and printing group) Hewlett-Packard
VJ, as he is known, has worldwide responsibility for all printing, scanning and digital camera platforms and for ensuring the leverage from investments in inkjet, laser and LEP printing technologies. He also leads HP’s digital imaging strategy and is responsible for key initiatives to transform the commercial printing market through digital publishing. He became the vice-president and general manager of the former inkjet imaging solutions personal imaging and printing organization in 1999 and had responsibility for all inkjet printing and imaging platforms. He also led the HP initiative on digital imaging appliances, infrastructure and services.

Vinod Dham
CEO, Silicon Spice
Known to the world as the ‘Father of the Pentium’, Dham left Indian shores on an engineering scholarship at the University of Cincinnati, with the proverbial $10 in his pocket. After working with NCR—a chip design company in the US—he joined Intel to lead the Pentium team. Subsequently, he went on to set up Silicon Spice to develop VoIP solutions for the communications market. His latest venture is NewPath Ventures, a tech company incubator that proposes to set up five hybrid Indo-US companies that will focus on chip-making, embedded software and system design.

Vivek Paul
president, Wipro Technologies
Drive. That’s the word that comes to mind when one thinks of Vivek Paul. He’s not old, but the swathe he’s cut in his professional life might well fool you into thinking he is. After a BE from BITS Pilani, Paul left for the US for an MBA from Amherst. After a few jobs, he landed up at GE—where he would spend the next 10 years of his life. In 1989, he was a member of the first GE evaluation team that came and started GE’s outsourcing relationship with India. Later, he helped identify, launch and for a while headed the Wipro-GE Medical Sytems JV. In 1996, he returned to GE to run its global computerized tomography business—which became a case study in global sourcing. In the three years since he’s taken over as president of Wipro Technologies, he’s grown the business by 45% and operating profits by 50% almost every year, plus given the company international branding like never before.