Software company to investment in Pakistan
ISLAMABAD — Turbolinux, a giant company famous for software solutions for Internet and enterprise computing infrastructure involving networking and operating system products, has planned to invest $ 16 million in Pakistan.
The investment would be made in different projects through Future Connect (Pvt) Limited, a Pakistan based company, which has brought Turbolinux in Pakistan.
Michael Bielicki, head of Technology Turbolinux and Fahad Hussain, CEO of Future Connect, hoped that the projects would play a pivotal role in improving working of government departments and private concerns.
They said that Turbolinux would start with Future Connect as its customer and would also be developing special software, subject to the requirement of the customers, in collaboration with the Future Connect.
They said that Federal Minister for Science and Technology Dr Attaur Rehman had personally invited Turbolinux to Pakistan to replace Microsoft operating system from every computer owned by the government.
The government was facing serious problem from Microsoft, as the company had asked her to only buy licensed softwares and also replace the pirated software with the licensed version.
The government might have to face a loss of millions of dollars, as it owns over 100,000 computers and the minimum cost of a Microsoft software or operating system for each computer is around $ 300.
To a question, the IT men said that Turbolinux would replace the operating system and provide necessary software to the government totally free of cost. A meeting is scheduled to be held between Dr Attaur Rehman and Michael Bielicki to finalise the arrangements.
Both companies would also be looking at developing infrastructure for Intranet connectivity of entire government machinery- the purpose for which IT Commission has been working for the last two years.
Turbolinux has received $ 100 million in private funding from more than 30 global computing and investment giants, including August Capital, BEA, Compaq, Dell, Deutsche Bank, Fujitsu, H&Q Asia Pacific, Hitachi, IBM, Intel, NEC, Novell, Oracle, SGI and Toshiba.
Future Connect (Pvt) Limited, an upcoming Internet service provider, established its network in Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. It has been setup to cater to the needs of corporate data communications market.
The company aims to becomes Pakistan’s leading Internet service provider and to enable wireless Internet connectivity through setting up an operation of Wireless Local Loop (WLL) networks throughout its service coverage areas.
The company is offering two Internet packages: The Net, which is unlimited Internet dialup access and, Hungama, which is prepaid hourly Internet dialup access cards. Both the packages have got tremendous popularity among the Internet users.
Source: The Nation
Date:5/6/2002
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