Celebration and aspiration at Andaman

Bangalore

January 22nd, 2008

It was an evening that celebrated the endeavors of solution providers across
the country. The third DQ Channels Excellence awards were given away during the
Solution Providers Summit in Port Blair, Andaman on the 19th January 2008. The
event saw partners from across the country getting felicitated for various
initiatives that had undertaken during the last fiscal.

The event began with Princy Bhatnagar, Director-New Office Group of Xerox
India making a presentation about his company, underlining that Xerox is not a
copier company anymore. Given Xerox's huge product portfolio, he urged partners
to take the opportunity to grow with Xerox and maintained that Xerox would
continue to leverage on its partners to expand its footprint across the country.
"I also want to reaffirm that unlike a few years ago we do 98 percent
through the channel today, which shows how serious we are about working closely
with partners," he added.

The first set of awards was a Special Jury's Prize and Locuz Enterprise
Solutions from Hyderabad bagged it. This company won this recognition for its
Incois tsunami prediction project, which will ensure that the moment a storm
build up on Indian coasts an alert will reach all coastal agencies and they get
a good half hour to launch evacuation procedures. While accepting his award from
Bhatnagar, Durganadh K Venkata, VP - Business Development and Operations of
Locuz thanked the Indian government and his team for making it possible for
getting this recognition.

The runner up for the 'Fastest Growing SP' trophy was Bangalore-based
Valuepoint Systems, which has registered a growth of 30 percent and has been
maintaining a three-digit growth rate for the past two fiscals. Accepting the
award from Sandeep Nair, MD, Emerson Network Power India, the usually reticent
RS Shanbhag, Director of Valuepoint Systems thanked DQ Channels and said that
his attendance to the SP Summit had become mandatory and was part of his annual
calendar.

The winner in the category was Visesh Infotechnics, which posted revenues of
Rs 110. 33 crore in the last fiscal, up from Rs 79 crore in 2005-06 making it
the natural claimant for this trophy. While accepting his award Sanjiv Bhavnani,
CEO of Visesh Infotechnics thanked DQ Channels for the recognition and making
him so popular and jocularly asked the photographer to click good pictures that
could be used in the future issues of the magazine!

The next category of awards category was given to the solution partners who
have a widespread service network in the country. The runner up for the 'Best
Service Provider' category was PC Solutions whose CEO Devendra Taneja had flown
his family to Havelock Island and then made it straight to the DQ Channels SP
Summit. He modestly thanked his team while receiving the award, stating that he
was actually taking this trophy on behalf of his staff.

The winner in this category was Accel Frontline, which has continued to engage
itself in providing comprehensive IT services for enterprises. This included IT
infrastructure management, software services, infrastructure solutions and IT
outsourcing. TO Asokan took the award from Mukesh Gupta, Director of AOC and
said that winning this award has instilled the fire within Accel to keep bagging
it every year.

The next set of awards for the 'Best Deployment' was given to partners who
have implemented complex and unique solutions. The runner up in this category
was Ontrack Solutions, which did a complex 20 Tivoli implementation and G
Balakrishnan received the award from Sudhir Nayar, Director-Partner Sales of Sun
Microsystems. Bala, as he is fondly called, said that achieving this award was
the best start for his year.

The winner in this category was New Delhi-based Team Computers who had to
deploy a data analytical project, which has been deployed at Fullerton and
Citibank. This same data analytics and reporting tool also helped Reliance Life
Insurance analyze a vast data and penetrate into the profitable sources. While
receiving his award, Ranjan Chopra of Team Computers thanked DQ Channels for the
recognition. "On this occasion I wish to say that the SP Summit has brought
us partners closer to each other. I have a couple of suggestions for the next
year's event which I will share with the people in the magazine," amidst
laughter.

The runner up for the 'Most Comprehensive Solution Provider' was Ashtech
Infotech which has added every leading IT brand in its portfolio and has managed
to offer vast spectrum of solutions, be it computing, which includes mobile
computing, storage, security, back-up/recovery, enterprise systems management,
and services, which include infrastructure management, technology consulting.
Accepting his trophy from Shyam Malhotra, Editor-in-Chief, DQ Channels, Saurin
Shah remarked that he himself did not know that his company had so many business
divisions!

The winner in this category was Bangalore-based Frontier Business Systems
which added new offerings like security consulting and certification and started
a new services division, while successfully launching the ITIL training and
certification in both Bangalore as well as Chennai. Ravi Verdes, received the
award and mentioned that he was looking forward to bagging more such awards in
the future too.

The most coveted set of awards was the 'Most Successful Solution Provider'
and the runner up was Allied Digital Services which had some new tie ups last
fiscal with some vendors like Echelon for intelligent building management
system, Epicor for enterprise resource planning and Verint for IP video
surveillance and video analytics solutions for physical security. Bimal Raj, CEO
of Allied received the award from Pradeep Gupta, CMD, CyberMedia India and said,
"This awards is truly precious because it adds a lot of value and
credibility to solutions providers like us when we go out to the market."

The maharaja of the evening was Ranjan Chopra of Team Computers, which bagged
the crowning glory of the 'Most Successful Solution Provider'. Elated on this
achievement, Chopra thanked all who made this possible and vowed to keep bagging
this trophy year on year.

The evening saw partners vying with each other to belt out songs on the
karaoke system and score perfect marks. Suresh Ramani and his group of fellow
singers managed to score the highest scores of 100 twice. The bonhomie and
camaraderie at the event made it hard to believe that a lot of these 100
solution providers were also competitors in business.