Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: The 4th Pakistan CIO Summit and Expo 2016, in conjunction with 2nd IT Showcase Pakistan 2016, organised by Solutions Inc, was held recently at a local hotel in Karachi with the theme ‘Solutions for Tomorrow: Vision 2020’, consisting of three focused sessions on IT governance, cloud computing and data analytics.

The format of the session included keynote speakers, sponsors’ presentation and panel discussion. All the presenters and panellists were senior IT professionals and CIOs.

The summit started with speeches by various executives from the industry followed by a documentary on Pakistan’s IT industry produced by Pakistan Software Export Board (PSEB) under the auspicies of Ministry of Information Technology.

Speaking on the event, State Minister of IT Anusha Rehman, also the chief guest, spoke about the ministry’s vision for IT, which is to put in place an accelerated digitisation ecosystem to enable socio-economic development, to expand knowledge-based economy, and to spur the economic growth. She said that IT is the fastest growing export sector of Pakistan at present with a growth rate of over 41% during 2014-15. Pakistan is also in Upwork’s top 5 countries, the world’s largest freelancing network, in terms of freelancing revenue, she added.

She mentioned that the government is offering many incentives to investors in IT sector including zero taxes on exports, 100% repatriation of profits, 100% equity ownership, and 7-year tax holiday for venture capital funds.

However, the industry has to reciprocate and collaborate with the government on defining KPIs for the IT sector over the next 5 years such as increase in remittances, foreign direct investment and employment generation. The minister emphasised the importance of public private partnership (PPP) and invited the IT industry to provide its inputs in the IT policy of the federal government to ensure growth of IT industry.

She said that it is optimal time for local industries to use local software to support our own IT industry. She focused on the concept of gender balance in the IT industry and mentioned that the ministry has kept a minimum percentage of 30% females in all industry support programs such as internships and trainings to motivate more females to join the IT workforce.

She said that Pakistan’s IT industry is a rising tide but IT companies have to improve reporting of remittances to formal state bank channels to reflect the true size of the IT industry.

The chief guest also visited stalls of different exhibitors at the event and emphasised that industry should play its role to aggregate figures to provide a better picture of Pakistan’s IT industry to the global world.