ISLAMABAD, Pakistan: National Telecommunication Corporation (NTC) and Microsoft Thursday agreed to cooperate on developing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) businesses and solutions for government and corporate subscribers.
Both the organizations inked Services Provider License Agreement (SPLA) in Islamabad in which Managing Director NTC, Brig (retd) Viqar Rashid Khan and Microsoft General Manager North Africa, East Mediterranean and Pakistan Leila Sarhan were also present.
Viqar Rashid said the NTC had made another historical achievement by partnering with Microsoft.
He said over last three years as per vision of prime minister to digitize Pakistan and under guidance of Minister of IT, Anusha Rehman, the NTC had made significant progress in providing modern telecom services in public sector.
He said the NTC was committed to reaching out innovative solutions to automate government processes and added the resolve to develop partnership with national and international organizations to introduce innovative and effective services was definitely a positive step in right direction.
The NTC had recently established first cloud based Tier-III National Data Center. Besides, the NTC was the first telecom operator which had launched “NTC GoSmart App” and Machine to Machine (M2M) Services.
Microsoft General Manager said with this partnership, service providers like the NTC could license Microsoft products in Pakistan and host software services and applications for their subscribers.
Some of the key benefits of this partnership would be to deliver tailored IT services through a dedicated or shared hosting environment, provide customers with the most current and capable Microsoft platform and to have the option to focus on hosting application solutions platform as a service (PaaS), software as a service (SaaS) and acquire infrastructure as a service (IaaS) from a Data Center Provider, including Microsoft Azure.
Pertinently during last three years, the NTC had carried out exponential technical growth to extend latest telecom/ICT services and as a result, the NTC had completed over 85 % of its ADP projects during last year.
The NTC had extended its network/infrastructure from 54 districts/cities to 87 districts/cities including 13 new districts in Sindh and 6 districts in Balochistan.
Over 50% network had been shifted from the TDM to the IP based Next Generation Network (NGN).
During the current year, the NTC would also complete 100% of its projects in time.