New Delhi, January 28 2017: Only one info-technocrat figures in this year's Padma honours list, announced on Republic Day: BVR Mohan Reddy Founder & Executive Chairman Cyient and Former Chairman NASSCOM.
On being awarded with the Padma Shri Award 2017, Reddy, said “I am honoured that the Government of India has recognized me for my contribution in creating Engineering R&D industry in the country. The award is also a recognition for a first generation entrepreneur for building a sustainable Global Technology Company. It acknowledges the effort put towards building a Digitally Empowered Society. I would like to thank Government of India for conferring me with this coveted honour.”
Mohan Reddy has been a pioneer of the Indian IT-enabled engineering services industry and the father of CAD/CAM in India
When he graduated in Mechanical Engineering in 1971 from the College of Engineering, Kakinada, in Andhra Pradesh, he decided to test the waters in the then new discipline of Industrial Engineering at IIT Kanpur and earned an M.Tech in that subject. Later he was to gain a second Masters in Management Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. He began his professional career with the DCM Group's Sriram Refrigeration in 1974 , before moving to MICO Bosch, and then to HCL.
When the Tata group company, Voltas and Dr Raj Reddy of Carnegie Mellon University came together to form OMC Computers in India, Mohan Reddy came on board as President and Managing Director. It was a fortunate combination. The Raj Reddy connection ensured that OMC explored the burgeoning field of CAD/CAM -- computer-aided design and manufacturing -- and Mohan Reddy's educational background in industrial and mechanical engineering found him embrace and promote the new technology, by bundling it with OMC workstations in the middle and late 1980s. OMC under Mohan Reddy's direction, provided for many Indian engineering and manufacturing companies, to undertake CAD/CAM in-house, using indigenously available hardware to run global standard software.
He carried this appreciation of CAD/CAM to Infotech Enterprises that he founded in 1992, where he created a niche in Geographic Information Systems (GIS), seeking work from foreign clients to convert paper based maps to digital format.... an early instance of outsourcing, at a time when the word had not yet been coined. In June 1999 the company acquired Data view Solutions, an UK basd GIS software company. A year later, Infotech acquired a German company, Advanced Graphics Software GmbH (AGS), a mechanical engineering software and services company specializing in 3D CAD/CAM, making Infotech a powerhouse of Engineering Design and Geospatial Data and Technology Services.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
See our picture story on CAD/CAM in India -- and
BVR Mohan Reddy
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
In May 2014, the company was renamed Cyient Limited, widening its scope to encompass engineering, networks and operations. Mohan Reddy remains with the company as Chairman and though its current clients and many of its 12,000+ employees across 38 global locations many not associate the present entity with computer aided design, India has reason to remember and cherish Mohan Reddy's contribution for making CAD/CAM an attainable, exploitable technology for thousands of professionals and enterprises. Cyient today, ranks among top 15 Indian IT services companies wth revenues close to US$550 million.