At the 10th International Asia Pacific ICT Awards (APICTA) held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Team Pakistan was recognised for excellence 7 times. Out of 16 APICTA categories, the P@SHA (Pakistan Software Houses Association for IT & ITES) delegation picked up 7 Merit Awards (the APICTA Silver equivalent).These included Merit Awards in Security Applications, E-Inclusion and E-Community, Financial Applications, Communications, E-Government and E-Health categories. Dr Mahatir Mohammed was the Chief Guest at APICTA this year and was the recipient of the first ever APICTA Life Time Achievement Award.
The Asia Pacific ICT Awards (APICTA) is an international awards program, which provides networking and product benchmarking opportunities to ICT innovators and entrepreneurs from 16 countries in the region, including Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, India, Vietnam, Sri Lanka among others. The programme is designed to stimulate ICT innovation and creativity, promote economic and trade relations, facilitate technology transfer, and offer business opportunities.In the last three years P@SHA delegations to APICTA have been making their presence felt but this is the first year in the history of the APICTA Awards that the Pakistan name was called 7 times across 6 diverse categories. The Centre for Advanced Research in Engineering (CARE) won the Merit Award in E-Government, Security and Communications with Avanza winning the Merit in the highly competitive Financial Category and CureMD winning the Merit in the E-Health Category. Aerocar and Solotech showed that Pakistani software companies are also looking at the unserved markets. They both won the Merit Award in the E-Inclusion & E-Community Category.
“We have always known that Pakistani technology companies are doing great work for customers in Pakistan and globally. This is simply an acknowledgement of their hard work and credentials at an international level by an international panel of respected judges”, said Jehan Ara, President P@SHA at the Press Briefing at a local hotel today. There were a total of 180 nominations across 16 categories for this year’s APICTA Awards.International recognition of this kind puts the Pakistan technology industry right up there with the best in the region and benchmarks local technology applications against those developed in high tech markets. It creates for Pakistan the image of being a knowledge based country proficient in creating cutting-edge software applications both for the domestic and international market.
“The P@SHA ICT Awards and the APICTA Award is a great way for Pakistani companies to build credentials in the Asian market”, said Yusuf Jan, outgoing Chairman of P@SHA. To represent Pakistan at the APICTA Awards, each of these companies picked up the Winner or Runner up award at the P@SHA ICT Awards 2010 which is now in its seventh year and has developed into the flagship IT and ITeS sector industry event in Pakistan – Brecorder
