Habib IT winding up?

I would like some feedback on this from readers in-the-know, from what I have heard in the last few days, Habib IT, one of two major AMD distributors in the country has winded up operations and will soon be shutting down the hardware business.

Habib IT has been around for about 2 years now and describes itself as an IT solutions provider. A promising company as it is, it seems like it wasn’t able to build a profitable business around the AMD line of processors. This isnt surprising and for the most part may not even be Habib IT’s fault (entirely). Pakistan is squarely Wintel country, which means Microsoft and Intel, and they defend it ferouciously, especially since it being such a young market there is very high revenue potential that is yet to be tapped. Box assemblers who have good partnerships with the Wintel consortium (Inbox, Raffles, viper,etc) are doing well. Those who do not, arent. Its really that simple. Even in the local enterprise market, Wintel has made several inroads against Unix locally and almost all SAP deployment are based on the wintel platform, which is an oddity in itself because globally they are usually run on Unix, especially on AIX, IBM’s flavour of Unix.

AMD itself does not have a Pakistan office , Intel on the other hand has a very strong local presence and walks away each year with millions of dollars in revenue from Pakistan. If AMD was serious about taking on Intel in Pakistan , well, I would think the first thing to do is to show up to the party!

Thank you…

Just a thank you to you, my readers and everyone else who links, contributes and talks about this blog. Ive been out of action for a week due to some personal commitments, but you guys have still been frequenting and reading, that made me really glad to have such a good audience

Im posting a huge update today to make up for the lost week..keep reading and contributing! You guys are the best!

Sheikh Zayed medical complex gets in line for automation

Sheikh Zayed is a large semi government hospital in Lahore, the closest thing one can compare to Agha Khan hospital in the Punjab. Then I guess its no wonder that recently when the E-government directorate sent out a tender asking for a Hospital Information Management solutions (HMIS) nearly 25 plus vendors (HMIS specific or not) -including- Agha Khan, (surprising since it normally keeps its IT solution strictly as an internal system) responded to the tender. The winner is yet to be decided in this lucrative and credential building project. After all, if you are a hospital IT solutions vendor ,you want the bragging rights of automating one of the largest hospitals in the country. This, along with civil hospital in Karachi could be the biggest two Hospital IT system implementations this year.

With so many hospitals (Army CMH, Civil, Abbasi, and now Sh. Zayed) option to automate this year, the HMIS market is exploding and with no real barriers to entry, every other small software house wants part of the pie. It is upto the Hospitals to do their homework and ask for the right credentials and right requirements when it comes to their software requirements. This is usually done through an independent consultancy firm that has -no- affiliation to software houses. (chee, we wont find that in this country now will we… ) . All these projects will drag on for atleast a year or two and what will probably happen is that once the dust settles we will be left with 2-3 strong local vendors and maybe 2 foreign solutions (implemented through local vendors) emerging in this market, which have a track record of actually implementing and successfully running these HMIS solutions. As always with ERPs its not the software that will determine success as much as the project and people management skills of the vendors implementation teams. Good luck to them.

New pictures of the Sirius Prototype V0.3

 Ive been tracking the progress of this one interesting, locally developed device for some time now and in what seems to be something close to spy pictures, Ive recieved some very cool photos of the new version of the Sirius. This to my knowledge is the only local PDA to be built so far. The application potential for it is staggering, from courier to inventory tracking to rural education.  Not only does it support urdu, it has its own embedded, custom developed OS known as the AlephOS.

This new version has a flip, provision for over 2GB of storage and a much nicer keyboard. Using local parts, this versions also optimized to be built at very low cost in low quantities, thus giving companies a real alternative to the 60,000 rupee plus imported PDA (think tcs, unilever,etc who have shelled out over 70k each for hundreds of PDAs like dolphin and symbol models)

Pictures below:

 

Full information here:

 http://www.fiveriverstech.com/sirius.htm

If you are interested in providing your feedback, promoting or helping develop the Sirius further, please send an email to sirius@fiveriverstech.com

flying around…

I will be in the north of the country wrapping up some projects and will return with a post sometime on wednesday this week. I have recieved pictures of the new Sirius protoype that Five rivers is working on. Will have a discussion on those plus on the latest from the ISP and hardware sectors, with updated news on Habib IT and where its going…

I categorized everything!

Now theres one good use of a Sunday… I catgorized the 80 or so odd posts I have written since July. You can hover over the category name in the “categories” table on the right to see what that category is about.

FAST-NU Lahore holding “Google Day”

UCES Media Group(NMG), a Media Society of FAST-NU Lahore is holding a Google Day @ FAST-NU Lahore this Monday, Jan the 8th. The event will be held at FAST , the agenda and NUCES contacts are below…

Mr. Omer Shakil & Mr. Farhan Khan, Software Engineers and Mr. Badar Khushnood, Pakistan Country Consultant from Google Inc. are coming to FAST-NU Lahore for a Tech Talk. Following are the details of Google Day @ FAST:

Presentation Topic: “A look inside Google Search”

Theme: “Power of Internet Media”

Speakers: Mr. Omer Shakil & Mr. Farhan Khan

and…no fair! I want to go to Google day FAST- Karachi..dont be outdone..lets hold one here too soon!

for more info contact:

ubaid khan
President
NUCES Media Group(NMG)
www.nucesmediagroup.com
FAST-NU Lahore

We salute those who have made it…

Pasting Jawwad’s short but must read post on non-Indian desis who “made” it. Just some end of day inspiration in case you needed some.. (I know I did today)

http://alchemya.com/blog/DesiStartup/2006/10/youtubes-desi-cofounder.html

MCB selects CA tools for their ESM requirements

MCB Bank recently selected Computer Associates Software (CA Unicenter,etc) for their enterprise systems management and monitoring needs. There was stiff competition from IBM with their Tivoli suite of products but reports are that CA was priced much lower (as is the case usually between CA and Tivoli globally) than the Tivoli Solution.

CA licenses usually though are billed yearly while Tivoli licenses can be one time with some maintenance.

CA has recently come into Pakistan (been about 1.5 years) and has had some wins, with companies such as Warid and MCB. Tivoli, for its part is deployed at UBL (an Si3 project) , Telenor (Done by LMKR) , Maersk Sealand, Standard Chartered Bank, and several other accounts where TSM (Tivoli Storage Manager) is prevalent.

Both have their own pros and cons, Tivoli though is still largely regarded as the global leader for Enterprise systems management, and what is loses in glitz and GUI , it makes up for in feature and fuctionality depth.

Motorola selects Techlogix over Tata and Infosys for BPM Project

In what is an amazing win for Techlogix, the company was recently selected over Infosys (yes THE Infosys) and Tata consulting services (TCS) for a major project for Motorola US.

Techlogix will be working with Motorola on BPM practices and implementations at Motorola’s global Center of Excellence in Business Process Management (BPM). Techlogix competed head on against giant Indian IT firms and US based IT consulting firms to win the project. No word on the dollars involved but I hear its big.

This also affirms that the areas Techlogix works in, they are the best at. Its not a small thing to beat mighty Infosys in a head on assessment by a Fortune 500 company. My congrats to them and the individuals+teams that made it happen. For the last 10 years Techlogix has, quietly, been working at building their technical skills and making their mark.

I also take this as a mental win for us as an industry as well. We look to the east and see a vibrant multibillion dollar IT industry, its one to learn from but its depressing when you see your own state. I sometimes wonder if we’ve missed the boat, since it certainly looks that way. And I wonder where we went wrong, since, essentially, we are the same people. But its times like these when its apparent that they arent that strong, and we arent that weak…. events like these might start opening the floodgates, one hopes…

http://techlogix.com/overview.htm