[October 31st 2008: Karachi, Pakistan] The Pakistan IT & ITES sector has been growing at the rate of 30% to 50% each year for the past 5 years with the largest member companies grossing between 15-30 million dollars in annual revenue and receiving 100 million dollar valuations. CIO served as a media partner with P@SHA ICT Awards that was divided into 20 different categories including Best of Financial Applications, Best of Communication Applications, Best in Digital & Media Entertainment, Best in Startup Category, Best in E-Learning and E-Health amongst others.
Many of the companies that started with a small number of people have grown to strong 40-50 people product companies or service companies with teams of 300 – 1000 people. This growth has resulted in high-paid employment for knowledge workers and an increasingly changing image of technologically savvy Pakistan, said Imran Zia Chairman of P@SHA in his opening address on Friday October 31st at the annual flagship ICT Awards event of the Pakistan Software Houses Association for IT & ITES (P@SHA) and CIO as a partner.
In its 4th year, the Awards event recognizes creativity and innovation in the local ICT sector and encourages excellence, the emergence of new ideas and entrepreneurship and was attended by a 300 strong contingent from the corporate sector, the ICT sector, the government and faculty and university students.
This year two new categories have been added: E-Community & E-Inclusion and E-Logistics. The winners of the P@SHA ICT Awards 2008 go on to participate at the Asia Pacific ICT Awards (APICTA) in Jakarta, Indonesia. In 2007 Pakistan picked up the Best in Financial Applications and Best in Communications Awards at APICTA in Singapore competing against countries like Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, among others. The judges committee for the PASHA ICT Awards comprised of Dr.Aamir Matin, GM Cisco Pakistan, Saba Kamal, IBM Pakistan, Jawwad Farid, Alchemy and Imran Zia, Chairman P@SHA.
Around 48 entries were received from across the country for this year’s P@SHA ICT Awards, according to Jehan Ara, President of P@SHA. She said the quality of nominations received each year just keeps getting better and it becomes difficult to choose just one winner and one runner-up. For instance in the E-Health Category this year, there were some really top notch entries. The judges therefore decided to award Cure MD EMR the Winning slot and gave two Merits – one to Adamsoft’s DocComply application and the other to Marriala Consultants’ e-Clinic application.
TPS Pvt Limited ran away with the top award in the strong contended Financial Applications Cateogy with PixSense winning the Digital Media & Entertainment Award hands down. It is interesting to note that PixSense has won the Award two years running with the new version being a far superior and stronger application than the one they had last year.
Jehan Ara said that the Awards Committee was happy to see increased participation in the Research & Development category which never used to attract much interest. This year Palmchip’s GeoTel Application had to compete against the likes of Five Rivers Technologies Sirius handheld and Jahanzeb Sherwani’s Health Line PhD Research project.
Several young companies were amongst the winners this year – among them SeenReport, the Citizen Journalism site, which incubated at LUMS and Chopaal, also a project from LUMS were judged to be the best in the E-Inclusion and E-Community Applications category.
Kraysis, another young company that incubated at LUMS and has now grown to 40 employees focusing on the niche area of Quality Assurance, won the Startup Company Award and Nuvica, a startup company started by Ali Raza Shaikh, a graduate of FAST Karachi won the Innovative Work Environment Award Nuvica impressed the judges because of the group of talented young developers who work on company projects but have simultaneously launched new exciting projects from within Nuvica.
Jahanzeb Sherwani, the young man whose product Jaadu VNC is selling on Apple Computers iPhone AppStore for US$25, won the Communications Award. He is finishing his final year of PhD at Carnegie Melon and is already a shining star of the Pakistan ICT sector.
As the Pakistan ICT matures and grows, companies are taking Branding and Packaging of their software products and companies much more seriously. The P@SHA Award for Brand Development this year was picked up by Kalsoft whose corporate identity has been totally revamped and is one of the strongest in the region.
P@SHA and the industry take Corporate Social Responsibility very seriously. This year the Award for CSR went to Syed Azhar A. Rizvi who spearheaded the telemedicine effort in the earthquake effected region on behalf of the industry. He also connected 7 or 8 institutes for the Blind with the DAISY forum resulting in the institutes producing talking books for the blind.
The event was sponsored by BearingPoint, Wateen, the National ICT R&D Fund, Oracle, Dell Computers, Kalsoft and PSEB. It was also strongly supported by CIO Pakistan and the blogger community across the country.
P@SHA decided to covert the event into a Fundraiser for the Balochistan Earthquake Relief and announced that base camps had been set up in all 3 major cities to collect blankets, medicines and food for the affected families.
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