|
The company was praised by the judges for increasing its workforce in Ireland from two in May 1999 to 190 by April 2002, as well as having an "impressive" turnover last year.
The awards ceremony, which took place on Wednesday evening in Dublin's RDS as part of the ICT Expo, also saw Entropy win the best Internet infrastructure service provider award for increasing sales in 2001 by 15 percent, while Avaya took the best call centre supplier prize.
The ICT Excellence Awards were established following the merger of the IT trade shows Comms and e-XPO. Previously, Comms held an awards ceremony, but the organisers of this year's event stress that the ICT Excellence Awards are more representative of the ICT industry as they cover sectors such as the Internet, telecoms, call centre and systems integration.
The 11 awards were designed to "pay tribute to high achievers" in the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) industry and companies were evaluated on whether they had introduced innovative, value-adding products and services to the Irish market and/or had helped developed a specific industry sector.
Other winners included Cable & Wireless, which took the top prize in the best network/systems integration company category for increasing employment by 10 in Ireland during tough market conditions, and for introducing security innovations. QMS Software took the SME E-business Award for carving out market share for itself in the extremely competitive IT helpdesk market.
Dell took the award for best example of e-business implementation in the private sector for the sales volume it conducts through its Web site, while Deloitte & Touche took the public sector version for its work with the Irish government, particularly in developing a filing system for company formations, which has garnered praise from the European Union.
The best service offered by a reseller was judged to have been from BIC Systems, which has 5,000 customers in Ireland and the UK using its on-site and remote services. The best publicity campaign for a new product was by CMS Peripherals for its Disgo storage device, while O2 Ireland took the most innovative new product award for introducing to Ireland the Blackberry product, which was developed by Canadian company Research in Motion.
The final award of the night, the industry person of the year, went to Kevin Dillon, managing director of the European operations centre of Microsoft. A former lawyer and accountant, Dillon joined Microsoft in 1991 and has been responsible for Microsoft's operations in Europe, Africa and the Middle East since 1997. The judges praised him for his contribution to the Irish ICT industry over the last 12 months. Dillon has been head of ICT Ireland since November 2001.
The judges of the ICT Excellence Awards were Liam Young (Conduit), Eamon McGrane (Irish Computer), David D'Arcy (ComputerScope), and Brian Doherty (InvestNI).
|
