Islamabad: Mr. Walid Irshaid, CEO and President of Pakistan Telecommunication Company Limited (PTCL) was awarded the TeleTimes International Leadership Award for Best BroadBand services in the region at the TeleTimes Annual International Industry Excellence Awards ceremony, held at Islamabad Club on Friday.

The prestigious award was received by the PTCL CEO and President Mr.Walid Irshaid from the Federal Minister for Finance Dr. Abdul Hafeez Shaikh in the ceremony which was presided over by Dr. Muhammad Yaseen, Chairman, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA). A large number of top executives from the telecom industry were also present on the occasion.

PTCL Broadband is the largest and the fastest growing broadband service in Pakistan. The service was launched in 2007 and currently Broadband Pakistan has 95% market share. The service is available in over 1100 cities and towns across Pakistan, leading the proliferation and awareness of broadband services.

Mr. Walid Irshaid, CEO and President PTCL has expressed extreme satisfaction on this achievement and has thanked his team for their dedication and commitment that they have put in to ensure the success of PTCL Broadband services. He also reaffirmed that under his leadership, PTCL will continue to lead from the front in developing and introducing new and innovative technologies for richer customer experience.

By Mohammad Yasir

National University of Science and Technology (NUST) in association with Evamp and Saanga is organizing a 4-day workshop on “Rapid Web Development through Ruby on Rails Framework on July 28-31.”

‘Rails is the most well thought-out web development framework I’ve ever used. And that’s in a decade of doing web applications for a living. I’ve built my own frameworks, helped develop the Servlet API, and have created more than a few web servers from scratch. Nobody has done it like this before.’ – James Duncan Davidson, Creator of Tomcat and Ant.

Ruby on Rails includes tools that make common development tasks easier “out of the box”, such as scaffolding that can automatically construct some of the models and views needed for a basic website. Also included are WEBrick, a simple Ruby web server that is distributed with Ruby, and Rake, a build system, distributed as a gem. Together with Ruby on Rails these tools provide a basic development environment.

Ruby on Rails is also noteworthy for its extensive use of the JavaScript libraries Prototype and Script.aculo.us for Ajax. Ruby on Rails is typically deployed with a database server such as MySQL or PostgreSQL, and a web server such as Apache running the Phusion Passenger module.

The workshop aims at teaching to promote rapid agile web development with clean application of MVC that is high-performance and scalable.

The participants will be trained

• To build Rails applications from scratch, manage database with migrations
• Learn about Ajax support in rails
• Understand ActiveRecord associations and validations
• Understand REST and how to use it in Rails
• Understand basic optimization techniques such as caching/eager loading

The trainer of the workshop will be Hasham Malik, who is Director Engineering at a leading software house, where he has lead teams to develop and deploy several RoR websites and applications.

Google Pakistan invited talented people to make MapUp community with help of its passionate and helpful mappers in our Map Your World Community.

The intent of the MapUps was to guide new users through the process of mapping their cities and neighborhoods while stressing the importance of having a complete map of Pakistan available online.

The month of June proved fruitful for mapping enthusiasts, tech buffs, and entrepreneurs throughout Pakistan as they gathered for a series of Google MapUps organized at universities in three major cities: Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi.

Led by Google Pakistan Country Consultant, Badar Khushnood and a trio of Pakistan’s Map Maker Advocates—Faraz Ahmad, Jabran Rafique and Omer Sheikh—the three events welcomed a total of 150 participants to learn the ins and outs of Google Map Maker.

Recent mapping efforts in Pakistan have been predominantly aligned with relief efforts following Pakistan’s 2010 floods and landslides, as demonstrated by Omer, Jabran and Faraz. Dr. Sayeed Ghani spoke at the Karachi MapUp about Sindh Flood Maps, his community-based geographic information system (GIS) that implements a Google Maps API to assist in disaster management. Dr. Sohaib Khan, who co-hosted the Lahore MapUp, has also focused on flood relief.

On a basic level, the aim of MapUps is to teach new and aspiring mappers the fundamentals of Map Maker, and to bring them together to map their community. Omer explained that “The idea is to get the participants started in the hope that they will continue mapping in the future.” Badar Khushnood and our Mapping Advocates ultimately highlighted the tools and motivation behind mapping, highlighting it as influential, inspirational, and humanitarian.

Two teams comprising of seven Pakistani students have acquired top honors among more than 33,000 participants from 52 countries in the largest ThinkQuest International Competition to date, sponsored by the Oracle Education Foundation (OEF).

Pakistani students were part of two award-winning teams; six local students Sania, Sadia, Narmeen, Iflah, Rohan, and Ahmed from Generations School created an entry called “Mini Mentors” in coaching of Ms. Aniqa Masroor. While another local student, Taleaa of Generations School, teamed up with students from Singapore to help create an entry called “Obesity.”

“Mini Mentors” was awarded 3rd place in the ThinkQuest Projects event, 12 and under age division. The entry focused on how ants can teach us to deal with problems as a community, through dedicated team work, organization and perseverance.

“Obesity” was awarded 2nd place in the Application Development event, 19 and under age division. The entry focused on raising awareness around weight issues and providing online tools to help people manage diet and general health.

“I would like to congratulate the winners of the ThinkQuest International Competition from Pakistan.  It is a pleasure to see these students being recognized for their hard work in creating projects that address key social issues,” said Ahsen Javed, Managing Director, Oracle South Asia Growth Economies – West.

“It’s been a splendid experience working on this project with the students. They were particularly excited about exploring the wondrous world of ants, and thoroughly enjoyed themselves in the process.” said Ms. Aniqa Masroor, Generations School.  “ThinkQuest has truly managed to engage children in positive learning activities by stimulating their creativity and critical thinking skills.”

ThinkQuest International Competition challenges students to solve a real problem using their critical thinking, communication and technology skills and the students presented solutions using a variety of technologies, including online applications and games, websites, photo essays, online blogs/journals, animations, and videos.

“The Oracle Education Foundation is pleased to recognize all ThinkQuest International Competition participants for their outstanding achievements,” said Brad Saffer, Vice President, Oracle Corporate Citizenship. “These students identified real-world problems and accepted the challenge to solve them through innovative, thought provoking solutions. Throughout the process, these students developed skills that will position them for success in the classroom and workplace.”

The winners were selected from among 7,603 teams and represented China, Great Britain, Greece, India, Indonesia, Maldives, Moldova, Pakistan, Puerto Rico, Romania, Singapore, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Taiwan and the United States.

Prizes for the winners include laptop computers, school grants, and a trip to ThinkQuest Live, the inspirational awards event in the San Francisco Bay Area.

According to the data published by findpeopleonplus the google+ fans are increasing everyday.
Below, you will find data sets broken by Gender, Geography, Workplace, as well as unique views such as Facebook employees vs. Google employees and so on. Based on a sampling of 947,996 Google+ users, here are the trends:

National Bank of Pakistan is planning to accomplish its major IT projects of on-line connectivity for 1000 branches and more than 400 ATM networks by December 2011.

The enhanced automation of banking system will provide one-click banking services to customers on 24/7 basis. This will also flourish the fiscal potential of NBP’s most widespread branches’ network in the country in line with the modern day requirements of stakeholders.

NBP team is restructuring various different areas of its system with an objective of bringing focus and better organization. The ongoing phase would introduce many new areas for the employments in specialized disciplines.

The bank has been moving on fast track basis towards implementation of Core Banking Application System, a move towards centralization of operations, while several other modules are also underway in this regard.

The fast paced automation will enhance the quality of customer services; increase in low cost deposits; strong compliance culture and increase of the bank’s fee based income are targets to be achieved under online swift banking system.

NBP is the only Pakistani bank that has bagged AAA rating in medium and long term banking against AA+ of other top commercial banks in Pakistan consecutively for the past many years.

Also, the NBP heralds an A-1+ in short term banking. With most stable outlook, the National Bank is counted as one of the very few financially viable and successful State-run institutions.

IBM has been present in Pakistan since 1952 and is committed to bringing innovative solutions to a diverse client base — to help them overcome their business challenges and to seize competitive advantage in the marketplace.

IBM has a strong local presence in this region as well as being a global business and technology leader, operating with a number of business partners who provide additional support, services and expertise. Through partnerships with businesses and governments across the world, IBM can help to build a smarter planet.

The country headquarters are based in Karachi with branch operations in Lahore and Islamabad and remote maintenance services in over 30 cities.

IBM’s clients include companies representing every major industry and endeavor. The majority of the company’s enterprise business occurs in industries that are broadly grouped into six sectors including Financial Services: Banking, Financial Markets, Insurance.

Besides different public and commercial sectors including Education, Government, Healthcare, Life Sciences, Industrial: Aerospace, Automotive, Defense, Chemical and Petroleum, Electronics, Communications: Telecommunications, Media and Entertainment, Energy and Utilities.

IBM Pakistan’s achievements

Business Continuity – Keeping business in business

Business continuity is vital to business success. And in today’s interconnected world, virtually every aspect of a company’s operation is vulnerable to disruption. Some risks could take your business offline for days, but in a competitive environment, even four hours of downtime could prove fatal. But how do you determine the resiliency and recovery requirements of your business? How do you identify and integrate critical business and IT priorities into a comprehensive continuity and resiliency program? Where do you start?

IBM Business Continuity and Resiliency Services (BCRS) can help. Business resilience extends beyond the continuity of business operations to include regulatory compliance, high availability, data protection; and integrated risk management.

Focusing on the need of business continuity requirements of customers in Pakistan, IBM extended the services portfolio by offering a Business Continuity and Resiliency facility Karachi. The BCRS was set up in 2004 and is the first-of-its-kind in the Middle East, Egypt and Pakistan territory.

Local Delivery Center

The IBM Pakistan Local Delivery Center (LDC) was established in July 2010 with the objective of serving as a resource center for IBM Global Business Services (GBS). The LDC serves as a sophisticated center of competency established on a global delivery model with a full range of remote capabilities and high value industry expertise, building capabilities ahead of demand to drive growth, and reuse delivery assets managed by high-quality offering delivery teams. The Delivery Center comprises of consultants with a mix of SAP, Oracle e-business, Siebel CRM, Business Intelligence and Maximo offerings focused primarily towards resourcing the local Pakistan market engagements. The geographical locations include the large urban cities of Islamabad, Karachi and Lahore.

IBM’s Green IT

IBM is uniquely capable of integrating industry and technology expertise with research and development to help businesses meet their urgent energy, environment, and sustainability challenges. Today’s energy- and climate-related issues are at the top of our strategic agenda. IBM solutions can help customers reduce costs and systemically minimize energy, water, carbon emissions and waste.

IBM Pakistan too helps customers become more energy efficient, implement new ways to source, manufacture and distribute goods and services in a more sustainable manner, enable safe and renewable sources of energy and manage resources at a macro level, transforming entire industries. We do this by finding inefficiencies, performing Data Center Energy Efficiency Assessment and Thermal Analysis, watching IT Power/Cooling Trends and Data Center Best Practice evaluation, doing Data Center IT Health Audit and utilizing Server Consolidation, Storage Optimization and Virtualization services.

The writer is Communication Analyst at IBM

By Muhammad Yasir

Inbox Business Technologies has won the ‘2011 Microsoft Country Partner of the Year Award’. They have been ranked at the top position among Microsoft partners for demonstrating excellence in innovation and implementation of customer solutions.

This is one of the best achievements for a company to secure award from global technology giant in the contest where winners chosen from a set of more than 3,000 entrants worldwide in multiple categories.

Inbox Business Technologies is recognised for providing outstanding solutions and services, as well as demonstrating excellent subsidiary engagement in Pakistan.

The winners and finalists will be recognized at Microsoft WPC 2011 in Los Angeles, July 10-14, 2011. This worldwide recognition of excellence identifies finalists and winners as a select few who truly stand out in a distinguished, competitive field.

Inbox started off in 2001 and set out to redefine Pakistan’s computing industry with the first local computer brand – the Inbox PC. Through which they bridged the gap between the Multi- National PC brands and the unbranded PC segment, bringing the customers economical, top-quality desktops and laptops.

In 2004, The Dawood Group acquired a majority stake in Inbox Business Technologies, giving a financial leverage so that they can play a dominant role in the local IT industry. From fifteen, Inbox Business Technologies has grown to an organization of 400.

Inbox was awarded the Superbrands Status in 2007, and subsequently Brands of the Year Award in 2008, the only local technology company to receive the popularity.

Inbox is regarded as an end-to-end solution provider to reckon in the local IT industry. Whether it is Technology Infrastructure, Systems Integration or Outsourcing Solutions, Inbox Business Technologies is ready to guide you all steps of the way.

In 2010, the same award was given to eSys Pakistan Pvt. Ltd for its best business partnership with Microsoft.

27 Jun 2011, Karachi, Pakistan: IBM launched Cognos 10, a flagship Business Intelligence solution in Pakistan on the 26 April, 2011 at the Pearl Continental, Karachi and on the 28 April, 2011 at the Serena, Islamabad. Mr. Adnan Siddiqui, Country Sales Manager, IBM Pakistan, in his opening note highlighted the history of Cognos, which started in 1969, became a leader in the Business Intelligence (BI) space and matured its BI and FPM (Financial Performance Management) solutions with its open architecture and enterprise-class technology.

With 23000 customers worldwide and more than 20 in Pakistan, spanning almost every industry, and several solution providers, Cognos along with SPSS, makes an easy choice for the customers, who want to exploit this cutting edge technology of Analytics today.

Mr. Derek Morrison, the Regional GM for Business Analytics for Middle East along with Ms. Ksenija Rusak, the Regional Technical Specialist for Central and Eastern Europe, came down for this launch event. They introduced BI and all that the new Cognos 10 has to offer to the customers, sharing their experiences about the product while highlighting its benefits to the Pakistani industry.

With the growing adoption of Business Intelligence in Pakistan, the event experienced tremendous response, where IBM had to double the capacity of participants. The IT and Business users alike, showed keen interest in the solution and got the chance to talk directly to the experts.

Morrison, with 10 years experience in the Business Analytics market in both the UK and Middle East, explained the Financial Performance Management requirement faced by current industry and how IBM has helped thousands of organizations around the world. Rusak, who’s co-authored Cognos 10 Redbook, demonstrated Cognos 10 new features to the audience.

A Demo Ground was set up by IBM Cognos business partners, where attendees could experience the product first hand. Mr. Sohail Minhas, CMO of Computer Research, authorized business partner of IBM Pakistan, also presented their portfolio and handled Q&A along with his team at the demo ground.

Cognos 10 helps organizations make smarter decisions, achieve better results, and gain a deeper understanding of trends, opportunities, weaknesses and threats. Cognos 10 lets you explore any data, in any combination and over any time period with a broad range of analytics capabilities.

Reported by Mohammad Yasir

NED University of Engineering & Technology, NEDUET, is organizing an All Pakistan IT Competition “TechElite”, for July 11th, 2011 in Karachi.

“TechElite” is an annual mega IT Event that has been playing a great part in exalting and dignifying the name of NEDUET for the past 4 years.

TechELITE invites the students from different Engineering Universities of Pakistan in order to display their expertise in four fields of IT Industry which include

• Speed programming,
• Network management,
• Software projects
• Software modeling and designing.

The objective of this event is to not only uncover the veiled talent of our youth growing in the engineering field but also to provide students with such enormous opportunities that serve as stimulation of their analytical abilities.

In 2010, the event was held on a much larger scale wherein 25 – 30 universities participated.

For the first time in Pakistan, Mobile Application Project and Mobile Application Development Competition will be introduced in which skills of the participants will be tested.

This year again, there will be 25 Teams in Mobile Application Project including participants from various universities and students from NED as well.

TechELITE is hosted by CIS department of NED University of Engineering and Technology. It was inaugurated in 2007 with only 20 universities and 270 students participating, the number of competing universities has increased to 30 and the competitors to 351.

With 4000-5000 spectators and an efficient and impartial jury, the students are judged fairly on the basis of their potential aptitude.

TechELITE, gives an opportunity to the future engineers to compete and demonstrate their proficiency and potential in their respective fields of IT.