Lifetime Achievement
Ashok Soota is an Indian IT entrepreneur who served for more than 30 years in the IT industry. He is a serial entrepreneur and the executive chairman and co-founder of Happiest Minds Technologies. Soota spent early years of his career with the Shriram Group of Industries in India in 1965. He served as President of Wipro Infotech from 1984 to 1999. Under his watch, Wipro’s IT business grew from US $2 million in 1984 to a US $500 million runrate in 1999.
Bitten by the global Internet economy bug, Soota co-founded Mindtree in 1999 as an Internet consulting company funded by Walden, Global Technology Ventures, and Capital International. He took Mindtree public in Feb 2007 with listing on BSE and NSE. He was involved with the company till the end of 2010 when he left and created his second start-up Happiest Minds, just at the dawn of the digital revolution.
Happiest Minds Technologies is a next generation digital transformation, infrastructure, security and product engineering Services Company. The company was judged a leader in the IAOP Global Outsourcing 100 List 2017, the ‘Digital Transformation Services Provider of the Year- SMB 2017’ by Frost & Sullivan.
Ashok is a leader of industry. He was President of Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), India’s largest Industry association and also President of Manufacturers’ Association of Information Technology. He has served on the Prime Minister’s Task Force for IT and on the Advisory Council for the World Intellectual Property Organization, Geneva. For his contributions to India’s IT industry, he has been recognized twice as IT Man of the Year by Dataquest, and also as Electronics Man of the Year. During his lifetime, Ashok Soota was responsible for creating nearly 25,000 jobs.
Soota is the founding chief patron of the Samarthanam Trust for the Disabled. He is the founding trustee for Ashirvadam, an NGO focused on the environment and support for the needy, including in terms of their education, vocational training and medical support.
For a lifetime of achievements and contribution to the IT industry, Dataquest confered the Lifetime Achievement Award in IT to Ashok Soota.