AGENDA SETTERS - WHO ARE THE DRIVING FORCES IN THE TECH INDUSTRY?

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Agenda Setters 2005
TOP 50
Azim Premji

No. 41 Azim Premji, chairman and MD, Wipro

Last year's position: 35

Appearing for a second successive year on the Agenda Setters list, Azim Premji is influential not just because of his role as Wipro's leader but because of his role as an advisor to the Indian government, a fact that makes him a "serious player" in the technology industry, according to one panellist.

Back in 1966 Premji dropped his Stanford University engineering studies to take over the $1.5m West Indian Vegetable Products company after his father's sudden death. He eventually renamed it Wipro and was instrumental in moving the firm into the technology sector in the 1980s to build what is now a $1bn per year business.

The only blips on Wipro's record this year have been the departures of CEO and vice chairman, Vivek Paul, and CEO of Wipro's BPO arm, Raman Roy. But under Premji, Wipro continues to cement its place in the top trio of Indian IT companies alongside rivals Infosys and TCS.

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ANALYSIS
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  5. IT Services
  6. Hardware
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  2. Public Sector
  3. Financial Services
  4. Retail & Leisure
Agenda Setters Past

Take a walk down memory lane - and find out who made the Agenda Setters poll over the years:

QUOTATION

"China clearly has many dimensions and many are setting an agenda. It's at the political level, it's at the investment level, it's at the contract manufacturing level and it's at the software level - it's all over."
--Peter Rowell, Regent Associates executive chairman and Agenda Setters panellist


AGENDA SETTERS .EXTRA

How to spend $4 billion? Google has plenty of ideas New York Times via International Herald Tribune

The resurrection of Steve Jobs The Economist

Developing the Skype ecosystem: Q&A with CEO Niklas Zennstrom DigiTimes.com

Ballmer: Microsoft 'not above learning from others' eWeek


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