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