Celebrating Excellence

It's the that of the year when we celebrate excellence by giving away the
DQ Channels Excellence awards to the best of the best solution providers of the
country. And this year, the excellence is being celebrated royally-on board
the Star Cruise Libra.

More than 100 of India's best solution providers went on a two nights three
days cruise from Mumbai to Goa and back. Besides one full day of attending
sessions relevant to their business, the SPs let their hair down in the evening
with some pulsating music and dance.

Amongst this dance and music, the achievements of the very best of the lot
were recognized by handing over the trophies. And these lucky SPs won their
respective trophies fending off tough competition from the others. The
distinguished jury consisting of Vivek Malhotra of Lenovo, Ajay Verma of
Symantec, Binod Panda of Ingram Micro and Hrishi Parthasarathy of Microsoft had
a really tough time in deciding on the winners. It took three rounds of
tea-coffee and plenty of debates before the winners could be decided.

Asim Raina Editor

Not surprising, most of the winners are no strangers to these awards. They
have been winning this award right since inception. For instance, my friend
Ranjan Chopra of Team Computers now has five such trophies in his showcase,
which he has won in different categories over the last three years. In fact, he
has the unique distinction if winning the award each and every year-a record
that he shares with Nitin Shah of Allied Digital Services.

Besides Ranjan and Nitin, other big time winners include Ravi Verdes of
Frontier Business Machines and Devendra Taneja of PC Solutions. These two have
also won more than a couple of trophies right since the inception of these
awards in the year 2005.

So what makes these awards unique? For one, these are the only set of awards
that recognize the excellent work done by the solution provider community. These
awards were instituted to appreciate the efforts of SPs who have succeeded in
improving their business across several parameters-revenue, service
capability, innovation, initiative and business skills.

Every year, the DQ Channels editorial team spread across five bureaus
collects and collates the data received from a wide section of the SP community.
After sifting through the voluminous amount of data, the final set is presented
before a carefully chosen jury, which then deliberates and finally comes to the
final conclusion about the winners.

Interestingly, there is no voting system that is followed. Every winner is
chosen unanimously, a record we are proud of. So, let's all stand up and give
the winners a standing ovation. They truly deserve it.