Absence of IPR laws is hampering the domestic IT industry’

Amir Rao is the Country Manager of Microsoft Pakistan. His appointment came into effect in January 2013. He joined Microsoft with 13 years of sales leadership and management experience in the telecommunications field.

Previously, he served as the head of business development at Nokia Siemens Network in Africa. He had also spent eight years working as Motorola’s country manager in Pakistan.

In an exclusive interview with The News, Rao speaks about the challenges confronting the domestic IT industry, cloud computing and intellectual property rights laws.

Q. What are major challenges being faced by the country’s IT sector?

A. There are two types of markets for the IT sector: the enterprise market (including large and small and medium enterprises) and the consumer market. While large organisations have developed their infrastructure connectivity, SMEs have not yet developed their broadband connectivity infrastructure. Until broadband proliferation is not improved, the IT sector cannot fully develop, especially in today’s era where there is immense focus on application development and its sustainability.

Second, the issue of intellectual property rights (IPRs) has been hampering the domestic IT market for a long time. The absence of IPR laws not only affects the larger companies, such as Microsoft, but it also affects the local software economy in general because the software and application developers are unable to protect their IPRs. Consequently, this forces youth to register their software and applications abroad. For complete post see here

Why Cloud computing is a boon for entrepreneurs?

Srinivasan Sundara Rajan explains why cloud computing is a boon for enterpreneurs 
Cloud Computing  holds a unique distinction  among all the  IT  inventions  in the past two decades, in the sense  it  really simplifies  the concept of  enabling  business capability through  Information Technology  resources,  by a   Self  Service,  Net work Enabled provisioning mechanism.  This ensures  that  the Information Needs  for business  are now available  as  a  service  which can be consumed and can be served to various consumers.
So  if we carefully analyze the adoption of Cloud,  the major   Drivers  of Cloud Computing  or not the   Developer or IT Community  but the underlying  business itself. With the following points hold the key for its adoption.

• IT  (Information Technology),  is  unable   to match the  Speed at which the  business wanted  to innovate  

• Time To Market  of new Services and Capabilities  is a great concern for business

• While there are  established IT shops around the world,  the   Capital Expenditure (CAPEX)  and Operational Expenditure (OPEX)  are high   such that the underlying  services provided by the business have to eat the cost, resulting in   non competitive pricing

• Business is unable  to pick and choose   the  business processes they wanted to adopt to the changing  market scenarios

• Business demand is fluctuating,  World Economy  is at cross roads,  Political and natural disasters add further unstability.  Current IT  does not  allow  businesses to expand  and shrunk on demand.

 For complete and original post see here 

If I Can Be An Entrepreneur, So Can You" Says Vivek Wadhwa

VIVEK WADHWA: I was 33 years old when I became an entrepreneur. I had developed a revolutionary technology at First Boston, a New York-based investment bank, and IBM offered to invest $20 million in it—provided that we spun the technology off into a new company. I was asked to take the job of chief technology officer. Here is complete story from WSJ