Sitharaman awards Express honours to stars in IT sector

UNION MINISTER of State for Commerce and Industry, Nirmala Sitharaman will give away the country’s most coveted IT awards — Express IT Awards — in the country’s technology capital today. Applauding the winners will be the who’s who of the IT world.

The winning candidates were picked by a high-powered jury comprising Google India managing director, Rajan Anandan, Infosys Co-founder Kris Gopalakrishnan, Facebook India Managing Director Umang Bedi, former Yahoo India R&D head and cofounder of ispirt Sharad Sharma, Nasscom Product Council chairman Ravi Gururaj and Indian IIT Bangalore director S Sadagopan; a record 406 entries were received and read through and assisting the jury in their task was Pricewaterhousecoopers.

Ashok Soota, former Wipro CEO and founder Mindtree and Happiest Minds will be felicitated with the lifetime achievement award for his immense contribution to making India an IT services powerhouse. Going strong at 74, Soota has been an inspiration to hundreds of IT professionals. Kavin Mittal, who’s messaging app Hike has managed to win over 100 million subscribers and some marquee investors too, will walk away with the Newsmaker of the Year award.

In its fourth edition now, the Express IT Awards have always attracted a large number of participants, this time around, the number of entries has crossed 400. The participants have been both fledgling firms and technology giants — Microsoft, Google, IBM, TCS, Infosys, Wipro, Dell, SAP, Amazon, Paytm, Flipkart, Uber and Ola are just some of the top names looking for recognition.

The competition has been keen across categories. As in previous seasons, this time too the innovation category has seen the maximum number of entries as over 100 as top IT firms clashed with new-age start-ups. The mobility category has drawn around 50 entries from companies including Freshdesk, Ola and Paytm.

In the analytics segment, IBM and Microsoft will face off against each other while the likes of Adobe, Zoho and TCS are competing against one another in the software solutions category.

In the fray in the e-commerce space are Flipkart, Amazon and Uber. Taking on each other in the start-up segment are Xiaomi, Simplilearn and Zoomcar. The digital citizen solutions category has seen a bunch of entries from the state governments and their agencies. States like Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan along with Railways, State Bank of India’s IT Centre and Ministry of External Affairs will make their presence felt this year. FE