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Our time has come now, says Ajai Chowdhry, chairman & CEO, HCL Infosystems, referring to the imminent boom in Indias domestic ICT market, We have worked for the last three decades for this day.

In a single sentence, Chowdhry effectively articulates not only why he deserves this awardthe DQ IT Person of the Year Award 2007but also why he deserves it now. Probably much better than we could have done.

Indias domestic IT marketafter remaining the poor cousin to the global exports market for longis beginning to get all the attention, not just from the American multinationals looking for growth but also from the so-far export-oriented Indian services firms. And this is a market that HCL Infosystems, under Chowdhrys leadership, can take a lot of credit for building, literally brick by brick.

And it was the patriotic Chowdhry who led that vision from the front. The son of a civil servant with a high sense of national pride, it just oozes out as Chowdhry talks about anything Indianbe it Indian music, his love from childhood; or memories of garlanding Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru at his fathers official residence; or talking about beating global PC brands in the desktop PC market. As Oscar Wilde says, only passion could be that sincere.

A member of the founding team of Hindustan Computers Ltd, the predecessor of what is today HCL Enterprisecomprising HCL Infosystems and the export entity, HCL TechnologiesChowdhry is the only one among the five founders who is still actively running an HCL business. His career: spanning from his days at DCM Data Products where he worked for Shiv Nadar and Arjun Malhotra before moving with them to start HCL; to his latest excitement about tapping the growth phase of Indias domestic market is a journey that almost tells the story of the evolution of Indian IT.

If the nationalistic Indian in Chowdhry pursued a made in India strategy to make HCL a brand in IT products, remaining at the top of the desktop PC market for several years, and, of late, staking a claim on the laptop market, the rational CEO in him, who was responsible to the shareholders, took a very hard decision because, for seven years, we did not make any moneyto take on the distribution of Nokia mobile phones. While growth was the driver behind the decision, it was a risky proposition considering it was very different from building products, creating solutions and dealing with computers. It was three new things at one go. While one can debate whether it has had the desired effect on HCLs future, it surely changed the distribution business in India. Contributing toward making Nokia the largest MNC in India, bigger than Unilever, and creating a distribution footprint that is matched only by the top 2-3 FMCG companies. Chowdhry has been credited with influencing Nokia to start manufacturing in India.

Manufacturing in India has remained a relentless pursuit for Chowdhry. He has not only been active in various MAIT initiatives, he has also been part of every single committee and advisory group that the Government of India has formed to study the potential of manufacturing of electronic equipment in India. Many a times authoring various reports and proposals to incentivize manufacturing in India.

He has been only moderately successful but is hopeful that the India story of manufacturing in automobile and steel will sooner or later be extended to electronics, and that day is not far off.

But Chowdhrys true radical contribution has been the proactive effort to create what is today a clearly defined market segment on its own rightthe home marketwith big celebrities endorsement. Not only did HCL release the first home PC, Beanstalk, way back in 1995, it created retail stores to create a shopping environment like that of consumer goods, and even established call centers to support the sales. But, as Chowdhry admits, it had to wait almost a decade before it became mainstream. Both, the home market and large format IT retail stores, are today a thing taken for granted.

To be discerning, while it may look that HCL claims to have pioneered everything in the Indian domestic market, and, whats more, all those claims seem to be fairly credible, the question to ask is: was there any other way for it? There is no company of HCL Infosystems size, stature, and breadth that operates in Indias domestic market that is listed in the Indian stock markets. While there are clear metrics for measuring the relative performance of services exports firms, there is virtually no peer for HCL. So it had to try out everything even if that carried the risk of staggering returns or even burning of fingers. It had no other way. It had to take those risks.

In short, HCL was ready to take those risks. And the big reason was that it believed in the market that is India. It believed that sooner or later, this market would unleash its potential. Whether that was rational thinking or pure passion is not the point to discuss now. Either way, it helped build the foundation for an industry that is all poised to take off now.

As the man driving this dream, Ajai Chowdhry deserves the accolades of the community. The award is a humble recognition of that.

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