We honoured some of IT's best and brightest at a luncheon event in October.

IT Leader of the Year, Large Enterprise Category

Charaka Kithulegoda, senior vice-president and chief information officer of ING Direct Canada, spearheaded a series of strategic initiatives to extend mobile functionality to ING clients. Rather than simply focussing on the more-popular iPhone and BlackBerry devices, his team created applications for the PlayBook, Windows Phone 7 and Android smart phones, making it the first bank in Canada - and until recently, the only bank in the world - to support all the major mobile platforms.

IT Leader of the Year, SME Category

Larry Franks was recognized for his work delivering a network of 26,000 smart meters and supporting IT infrastructure for Peterborough Utilities Group, where he is vice-president of technology services.

IT Manager of the Year, Large Enterprise Category

Eric Swanson, data centre manager with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, received the IT Manager of the Year in the large enterprise category for his work on a data centre and intelligent containment project, which was recognized by the Uptime Institute in May as a world-class innovative approach to increase a data centre's cooling efficiency.

IT Manager of the Year, SME Category

Kalyan Chakravarthy, director of IT for the Toronto International Film Festival, moved the festival's e-mail platform and applications into the cloud three months into his tenure, then supervised the relocation of TIFF's offices with minimal disruption and down time.

IT Mentor of the Year

Avi Pollock, vice-president of innovation and strategic planning with RBC Financial Group, leads the Next Great Innovator Challenge, an innovation contest open to students nationwide that has attracted more than 500 team entries. Recognizing the need for RBC to tap into the knowledge of its employees, Pollock created an internal version, the T&O Employee Innovation Challenge, which attracted participation from more than 500 employees.

IT Educator of the Year

James McKeen of Queen's University has co-founded two industry forums bring that bring together leaders in the industry to discuss critical IT issues, bringing that research into the classroom and linking graduate students with business leaders. (McKeen was unable to attend the luncheon, and no photo was available.)