NIIT (earlier called National Institute of Information Technology) was founded in 1981 by three professionals, Rajendra S Pawar, Vijay K Thadani, and P Rajendran, with support from, Shiv Nadar, one of the pioneers of the Indian information technology industry. Their combined vision of the training requirements of the information age resulted in NIIT.

The board of NIIT includes Rajendra S Pawar, managing director of the company, Vijay K Thadani, chief executive officer, P Rajendran, chief operating officer, Arvind Thakur, director and president, software solutions, and Gopal D Chakravarthy, managing director of NIIT’s European operations. The board has two external directors -- Mr Subroto Bhattacharya and Mr Amit Sharma.

NIIT is a $160 million information technology company, with a market capitalisation of $2 billion. It has customers such as British Airways, Citibank, Deutsche Bank, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Reuters, Sony and the World Bank. It has a presence in the Asia-Pacific region, Europe and the US, besides India. It was conferred with the National Human Resources Development Award in 1998 for its ‘People Vision’.

NIIT''s software business has been assessed at SEI CMM Level 3. SEI refers to the rating given by the Software Engineering Institute according to its ''capability maturity model'' for assessing software processing capability.

The benchmark places NIIT among the top one per cent of global organisations that deliver quality software, the company says. Most of NIIT''s businesses have ISO 9000 certification from the  BVQI, another quality certifying organisation.

The company intends to add 100 new computer education centres per year and increase its presence in 50 countries.  In the software solutions business, the target is to achieve SEI CMM level 5.