NPA Honors Networking Industry Excellence

The Network Professional Association will honor the achievements of two of its peers at next month's Interop event in Las Vegas. Professor Tadao Saito, CTO of Toyota, is receiving the Best Networking Professional–Career Achievement Award for his lifetime work in a variety of areas related to digital communication and computer networks. Ravikanth Chaganti is getting the Top of the Mark–Volunteer Award for his efforts in the Bangalore, India, IT community.

The NPA was established in 1991 to promote professionalism in the networking community. It now has more than 19,000 members in over 50 countries, says Richard Kelley, chairman of the Awards for Professionalism, and vice-chair of the association. He says the award to Tadao Saito is significant. "We consider this a global hall of fame award," he says. "It represents the highest award in the industry."

Kelley says Saito was selected because of his work in the communications and computer industries. Chaganti is being recognized for his significant contributions volunteering in the Asian region.

Saito is considered a pioneer, inventor, researcher and innovator, whose achievements include the invention of digital switching that laid the foundation for all digital communications, including voice communications and the Internet. He earned his first patent in 1964 on digital time division switching networks, and invented both Time-Space-Time and Space-Time-Space time division switches, the core technology for time division telephone switching systems used globally since 1975. In addition to being the Japanese representative for the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) General Assembly and Technical Committee 6 (Communication Systems), Saito is a life fellow of the IEEE and honorary member and life fellow of the IEICE.

With more than a decade of experience in the IT industry, Chaganti is a valued volunteer in the Bangalore IT community, and was instrumental in making the Bangalore IT Pro user group (http://bitpro.in) a success. The Dell staffer joined the user group in 2009 and became one of the four leads. A Microsoft Windows PowerShell MVP for the last two years, he has authored several technical articles and two successful e-guides, and is a regular blogger (http://www.ravichaganti.com).

The annual NPA Awards for Professionalism program, sponsored in conjunction with Interop, Microsoft, GITCA, Cisco Press, Windows IT Pro and Agile IT, was launched at Interop Las Vegas in 2002. The association will be exhibiting at Interop, recruiting members and beginning the evaluation process for next year's set of award recipients. For more information, visit here.

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