CIO&Leader: India's Fortnightly Magazine for Technology Decision-Makers
CIO&Leader is an Indian magazine for technology decision-makers, published from Mumbai, Maharashtra, and addressed to chief information officers and the senior executives who work with them. Described by its publisher as India's leading fortnightly magazine for its audience, it promotes the exchange of informed perspectives and insights on trends, management techniques and new IT business strategies between CIOs and other stakeholders. It is acknowledged in its own positioning as a trusted source of knowledge for top management responsible for balancing the demands technology places on growth and governance. Now presented as part of ET Edge, the Times Group's business conferences and insights platform, CIO&Leader combines the magazine with research, awards and an annual conference that together serve India's enterprise technology leadership community.
Origins in 9.9 Media
For most of its life CIO&Leader belonged to 9.9 Media, also known as Nine Dot Nine Mediaworx, a niche media company founded by five senior media professionals and led by founder and managing director Pramath Raj Sinha. The group built its business around highly targeted professional communities, integrating print, online, research and event platforms for audiences including owners and chief executives of high-growth enterprises, CIOs, chief technology officers, chief security officers, chief financial officers, IT professionals and personal technology enthusiasts. Its leading brands included CIO&Leader, Digit, CFO India, EDU, IT Next and Inc. India. Within that stable, CIO&Leader was the title for the top of the enterprise IT pyramid, while IT Next, launched with an initial print run of 10,000 copies and a cover price of 150 rupees, was created for the next generation — senior IT managers preparing to become CIOs. The pairing showed the group's method: define a professional community precisely, then serve it in print, online and in person.
A Fortnightly for the CIO's Two Jobs
The magazine's editorial premise is that a chief information officer has two jobs at once: using technology to grow the business and governing technology so that it does not endanger the business. Its coverage, in consequence, mixes digital transformation strategy, enterprise technology investment, IT leadership challenges and vendor evaluation with management technique. Content is produced by an in-house team of editors and researchers, and the publisher has emphasised the closeness of that research and editorial work, a continuous research function fuelling the editorial engine, and a 360-degree connect with the CIO community through a range of products and services. A mobile app edition carried the magazine to Android readers as early as 2016. For advertisers, the title's appeal has always been the same precision: reaching the actual decision-maker who signs off enterprise technology purchases, in an editorial context that confers credibility on the vendors who appear there.
From 9.9 Group to ET Edge and the Times Group
The wider Indian media consolidation of the 2020s reshaped the magazine's home. In May 2024, Times Network acquired Digit, the consumer technology brand that had been 9.9 Group's flagship since 2001, including its print and digital business, as part of the Times Group's investment in digital publishing communities. CIO&Leader's own institutional home in the current period is ET Edge, the Times Group platform for business conferences and thought leadership, whose enterprise technology publications carry the CIO&Leader name. The 27th annual ET Edge CIO&Leader conference — a numbering that itself testifies to the longevity of the community the magazine anchors — brought technology leaders together around deploying artificial intelligence at scale, with the chief operating officer of ET Edge describing the event as a platform for leaders to exchange experiences and shape the roadmap for intelligent enterprises. The magazine thus moved from an independent niche publisher into India's largest media conglomerate while keeping its community identity.
Research: The State of AI in Indian Enterprises
Research has remained central to the brand in its ET Edge period. A key highlight of the 27th annual conference was the unveiling of State of AI in Indian Enterprises 2026, described as ET Edge CIO&Leader's latest research report, authored by its editorial director for technology, R. Giridhar, and the chief editor of its enterprise tech publications, Jatinder Singh. The report examined the evolving AI landscape across Indian enterprises, highlighting governance, data readiness, return-on-investment measurement and the scaling of AI deployments. The conference discussion around it captured a shift the magazine's pages have tracked for years: enterprises moving beyond asking whether to adopt a technology to asking how to execute it at scale while balancing trust, governance, economics and measurable business outcomes. CIOs, speakers observed, are becoming architects of autonomous enterprises rather than custodians of IT infrastructure — a redefinition of the very role the magazine was created to serve.
Awards and the NEXT100 Pipeline
Community recognition is the brand's second pillar. The CIO&Leader Samman honours serving technology leaders, while the NEXT100 awards identify future CIOs. The NEXT100 programme was run alongside IT Next magazine, recognising senior IT managers judged to have the potential to step into the CIO role; award citations from companies across Indian industry — credit companies, breweries, energy and manufacturing firms among them — show how widely the programme reached into enterprise IT departments. Together the awards create a ladder of recognition that mirrors a technology career: NEXT100 for the rising manager, the Samman for the established CIO. For a magazine, such programmes do more than fill an events calendar; they continually renew the readership, identifying each new cohort of technology leaders and binding them to the title early in their ascent.
Readership and Community
CIO&Leader's professional community numbers in the tens of thousands online, with its LinkedIn company page recording roughly 34,000 followers and listing its headquarters in Mumbai Suburban, Maharashtra, and a workforce in the 51–200 range across the operation. Its readership profile is deliberately narrow and senior: CIOs, CTOs and top management in enterprises and mid-sized growth companies, the executives who influence large technology procurement decisions. Trade commentary on the title notes that this combination of editorial credibility and executive access is rare in Indian technology publishing, and that brands appearing consistently in its pages earn a credibility that digital retargeting cannot replicate. In B2B media, context is the product, and CIO&Leader sells a context in which every other reader is also a decision-maker.
The Changing CIO Agenda Reflected in Its Pages
The subjects that dominate CIO&Leader's current agenda show how completely the CIO role has changed since the magazine's fortnightly print era began. Enterprise artificial intelligence, data readiness, cybersecurity, cloud economics and governance now stand where systems integration and enterprise software rollouts once stood, and the magazine's conference and research programme treats trust and measurable outcomes as seriously as innovation itself. Its editorial leadership in the ET Edge period speaks of leaders who must focus not only on experimentation but on execution, and of CIOs becoming architects of their enterprises rather than operators of infrastructure. That shift also explains the brand's durability across owners: whoever publishes it, the magazine sells continuity of community knowledge at a moment when the technology changes annually but the leadership questions — how to choose, how to govern, how to prove value — remain constant for its readers.
Why CIO&Leader Matters
CIO&Leader matters because it documents, from inside the profession, the transformation of Indian enterprise technology leadership. The CIO it was founded to serve managed systems; the CIO it serves now is expected to lead digital transformation, govern data and artificial intelligence, manage cyber risk and deliver measurable business outcomes. A fortnightly magazine, a research programme, an annual conference in its twenty-seventh edition and two ladders of awards have made the title a durable institution of that profession, surviving a change of ownership from an independent specialist publisher to the Times Group's ET Edge. For readers mapping India's business magazine sector, CIO&Leader is the clearest example of the community model of B2B publishing: a narrow audience, known by name, served in print, in research and in person.
