Battles in the Basement

How DQ and its flagship

‘Top 20’ annual grew into a high-stakes listing that grew from negotiations, arguments and months of research captured in a dBASE database

One of the early memories I have at Dataquest, then run, written, edited and designed in a basement in the publisher’s South Delhi home, is of industry stalwarts battling it out in a basement.

I had just taken up my first real job, as Dataquest’s assistant editor, convinced by then-editor Raju Chellam, that this would be my true calling (after spending two years freelancing as a tech journalist, following an unrelated physics degree from St Stephen’s).

I’d jumped straight into the fire – Dataquest’s flagship DQ Top 20 annual was two months away. It was the only compilation and listing of the top tech firms in India, and modelled after the Fortune 500.

Listings. How big a deal could it be? I was about to find out.

With most tech firms not publicly-listed in those days, a lot of our work for Top 20 involved ranking based on revenue estimations – and debates, arguments and negotiations on those figures with the founders and CEOs of those companies. A higher rank was important for them – and critical for some segments and competitors, NIIT and Aptech being a prominent example, or HP, Dell and IBM (long before Lenovo).

The founders and CEOs of those pioneering tech companies would be in that basement, late in those evening hours, arguing out the figures, fuelled by tea, samosas and kababs from the nearby Panchsheel Enclave market. And on our side of the table, an amazing editorial team that was learning, adapting, reporting, questioning – and being driven to more, by then editor-in-chief Shyam Malhotra and the always hands-on publisher, Pradeep Gupta, both IIT-Delhi and IIM-Calcutta alumni.

India’s tech industry? It’s today a $200 billion-plus behemoth, exporting more services than any other country in the world. And this industry also created an exploding base of talent in India – talent that helped create a thriving startup ecosystem that has drawn over $60 billion in funding in just the past two years.

As a testimony to how excited, challenged, and empowered the editorial teams were – most of the senior editors and business managers at Dataquest and its sister publications, stayed on in CyberMedia typically for over two decades, as I did. That is extraordinary in the media business.

As the global tech firms entered those listings – they were even warier about sharing data officially, given that they didn’t publish revenue data for India. The estimates, arguments, negotiations would stretch over weeks. We’d actually find out the average selling price of CPUs and processors and hard disks, estimate the numbers in each segment, and arrive at effective revenue and a DQ Top 20 rank.

Nice, till the tax authorities started reading DQ Top 20 and started asking companies where the tax on all these revenues were! (It was above board – processors for instance would mostly be sold to OEMs in other locations, where the motherboards were assembled, so Intel or AMD would technically not have revenue in India – but we’d still attribute revenue and ranks for the DQ Top 20.

This rigorous work, estimating products and services revenues, earned Dataquest tremendous reach, respect and influence – and being a ‘DQ Top 20’ or a ‘DQ 50’ company was a badge of honor for many.

As the 1990s blended crossed over into the new millennium, the Top 20 got bigger and bigger, so did the stakes, the figures, and the databases. The Top 20’s volumes of data ran on DOS-based databases, dBASE and FoxBase, in the 1990s, maintained by our trusty tech assistant Mohan Singh for well over two decades, till it outgrew those and we gradually migrated to Excel and other databases over the decades.

What remained consistent was the influence and value of the Dataquest Top 20 – not just for individual company ranks and revenues, but industry and segment size estimations, growth, projections, market share and pretty much all factual reference for Indian tech in the 1990s and later. Global media would reach out, reporters often visiting our libraries to refer to old volumes – till it all went online.

And those industry stalwarts whom we’d battle over data with? They have been the guiding lights of Indian tech. A few, such as TCS’s FC Kohli, the father of Indian software, are no more. But many are going strong. HCL co-founder Ajai Chowdhry, ‘the father of hardware’, still working hard to drive India toward a hardware product-manufacturing nation through his Epic Foundation: he wrote about India as a Product Nation in Dataquest February. Rajendra ‘Raji’ Pawar, who virtually created computer education and took NIIT global, creating NIIT University, now among the top 10 private tech universities in India.

And India’s tech industry? It’s today a $200 billion-plus behemoth, exporting more services than any other country in the world.

And this industry also created an exploding base of talent in India – talent that helped create a thriving startup ecosystem that has drawn over $60 billion in funding in just the past two years.

This is an industry that Dataquest has played no small part in helping grow, since the publication’s birth in 1982 – more or less coinciding with the industry’s birth.

It’s been an honor to be part of this story.

Prasanto K Roy joined Dataquest in 1990 as assistant editor, staying on as president and editor-in-chief at CyberMedia Publications until 2012. He writes on tech and policy, loves world cuisines, and is active on Twitter as @prasanto. His house in Delhi was the first certified green home in India. His advises global firms on public policy as managing director at a NYSE-listed, US-based advisory firm.

Prasanto K Roy

maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in