Channel partners and industry leaders from all over North India gathered at Hotel Inter-Continental Eros in Nehru Place to witness the 11th Annual The DQ Week awards on July 6. The 400 strong crowd took part in the felicitation of the people who have made an indelible impression on the IT channel community of the region last year.

Sify was the title sponsor for the awards, while D-Link and DigiLink, K7 Computing, Supertron Electronics and Delta were the associate sponsors. Also associated with the awards were Sybase as the Business Intelligence Partner, Royal Challenge as the Beverage Partner and EMC as the Information Infrastructure Award Partner.

The award night was supported by twin channel partner associations of Delhi, PCAIT and CMDA.

In his opening speech, Ibrahim Ahmad, Group Editor, The DQ Week thanked the channel community for their attendance. He spoke about the positive aspects of the national budget, which was announced on July 6. Ahmad also touched upon the 'Unique ID Card Project' undertaken by the government and headed by Nandan Nikelani. He elaborated that the channel partners have a big role to play in bringing the project to prominence and propelling it to success.

The evening kicked off with a visual presentation by Sify. Anil Pant, VP-Channel Sales, Sify and Shiv Nath Ghosh, VP-Enterprise Application Services, Sify spoke about the importance of making profit during this downturn and how a partnership with Sify can allow the channel community can achieve just that. The company also invited on stage one of its prominent partners to tell the gathering about the benefits of doing business with Sify and also the edge that the company's services offering provide to the channel partners.

Rajan Arora of Megahertz Infotech said that one of the things that he liked about working with Sify was the high level of assistance that the company provides to its channel partners. On a personal note, Arora informed the audience that since he had partnered with Sify, because of their offerings he was now able to add an additional revenue of Rs 40-50 lakh per month.

Presentations were made by various distinguished members of the IT community. The evening also saw some special awards being given away in conjunction with channel associations. The DQ Week-CMDA Upcoming Entrepreneur of the year award was bagged by Sudhir Midha of Sumangalam International. Puneet Singhal, President, CMDA gave away the award.

The most touching moment of the ceremony was when PCAIT awarded the annual The DQ Week-PCAIT Ashish Aggarwal Memorial Trophy. In a speech delivered straight from the heart, Saket Kapur, General Secretary, PCAIT recalled Ashish with fondness. Reminiscing about Ashish, Kapur said, “Ashish was a go-getter. The amount that he achieved in a short time was amazing. He took over a well established business from his dad and then went on to take it to bigger things. He was snatched away from us very early but we all recall the qualities that made him special. And those are the very same qualities that we see in our winner Gurpreet.”

The entire executive council of PCAIT came on the stage to honor Gurpreet Singh Bhatia of Arrow Technologies.

Madhura Khasnobis
madhurak@cybermedia.co.in

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