Owais Mughal
Measuring success is a relative term. A type of success where most people seem to agree is the success in one’s profession. Pakistan’s public universities and colleges, inspite of their little known world status, have repeatedly produced people who have excelled at all world forums. We have one such recent success to report where members of Pakistani diaspora; all with education from a public university of Pakistan; have excelled in their profession internationally.
The sucess story is of a hi-tech company in US which went public yesterday and got listed at NASDAQ. The Company’s name is Cavium Networks. It was co-founded in 2000 by Raghib Hussain, a graduate from NED University of Engineering and Technology Karachi. After the initial set-up, Raghib was joined by Amer Haider and Imran Badr; also the graduates of NED; who helped in establishing the marketing and software departments for the company respectively.
While many years of hardwork brought the success to these gentlemen and their team, the point to be noted is their roots of technical skills and education which was imparted to them in public institutions of Pakistan. I read it at PASHA (Pakistan Software Houses Assosiation) website that it is the story of people who are making it big from the corridors of NED university to Wall Street.
Up until 18-20 years ago, the three main characters of our success story, probably oblivious of each other’s existence, were studying at three different Government owned pre-engineering colleges of Karachi. 
Raghib went to Karachi’s Delhi Science College.
Photo to the left is a satellite image of Delhi College Karachi.
Amer Haider went to DJ (Dayaram Jethmal) Science college and Imran Badr went to Malir Cantt college. Good grades in their HSC exams got these gentlemen an admission into a public sector university (NED). Raghib was two years senior than Amer Haider and Imran Badr and went on to graduate as a Computer Systems Engineer in 1993.Amer Haider graduated as a Mechanical Engineer and Imran as an Electrical Engineer in 1995.
Despite graduating from the same university the paths of these three?gentlemen were still very different. Raghib started his career working at Zelin (Pvt.) Ltd., and then ITIM Associates in Karachi before moving to US.
Amer Haideralso started his technical and management career in Karachi with Wavetech and other local concerns before moving to the US.
Imran Badr worked in Karachi for 4 years with local companies and Reuters before moving to the US.
In US the newly founded company brought these gentlement together and the talent produced by Pakistan’s public sector educational institutes blossomed. Today Raghib is the company’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and VP for Software Engineering. Amer Haider is Director of Strategic Marketing and Ecosystem Development and Imran Badr is the Lead Software Architect.
In the photo above the three gentlemen standing from L to R are Amer Haider, Imran Badar and Raghib Hussain
Along the way,few more NEDians have been joined the team; specifically Faisal Masood, Syed Saadullah Hussain in Software and Sabahat Ashraf the lead technical writer. The total work force strength of the company has now grown up to 177.
Yesterday was a big day in this company’s history as it went public and we wish all the stakeholders good luck. We would also like to hear more stories of succes from you where Pakistani diaspora coming from Public institutions have done well in their profession. Please share your thoughts and experiences below.
Acknowledgements: Special thanks to iFaqeer who provided me with background material and two photos for this article.
I have no personal experience of the IT industry, but
I am told that outsourcing to India is not as smooth as it is often made out to be. From what I have heard, not all Indian IT graduates are bombshells, in fact most of them are average, and many frustrating mistakes are also made in outsourcing projects before preparing a final product.
Basically, India had two main advantages: the first mover’s advantage and the fact that it has a large number of graduates. Now that India has already made a name for itself, Pakistan, being a late starter, is finding it hard to catch up, and this has naturally become more difficult after 911 due to our serious image problem.
Pakistanis who think India’s IT success is due to its democracy are also grossly mistaken, it’s got more to do with visionary leadership. If any of our earlier leaders (civilian or military) had invested a bit in education and if Bhutto had not nationalized the industry, things might have turned out differently for us too regardless of the crisis with democracy.
“I emailed the Economist’s South Asia editor about why his publication and others never talked about Pakistan’s good prospects. He said the main interest in it will always be terrorism-related since that’s what their readers are interested in.”
I wonder what the nationality of their south asia editor is?
In any case, this is a pretty dumb explanation. Even if the main interest of the readers is terrorism related, it is the media’s duty to highlight important things that have escaped public attention.
Take the example of Pakistan’s English dailies, not everything they publish about social issues is in high demand, yet they do print that kind of material out of a sense of social responsibility and have still not gone out of business as a result.
Owais – great job in starting this series, hope to read more on this topic in coming days.
To clarify, I’m not saying Pakistan is a much worse place to do business in than India. However the common Western perception is that it’s an unstable dictatorship on the verge of being taken over by Al Qaeda sympathisers. They don’t realise it’s a country of 160 million people where FATA\Waziristan is well, well away from the Punjab-Sindh corridor, the talent available is high-quality and cheap and the biggest obstacles to business are the ones affecting Third World countries everywhere.
I emailed the Economist’s South Asia editor about why his publication and others never talked about Pakistan’s good prospects. He said the main interest in it will always be terrorism-related since that’s what their readers are interested in.
Thus it’s relatively easy to get unknowledgeable investors, customers and suppliers on-board if you say you’re sourcing work to India but as far as they know, we’re another Somalia.
Qaisrani: When this US company with all its executives from US can have an R&D center in Pakistan, why Cavium Networks can’t have
Because Syed Ali (the CEO) is from Hyderabad (India) and is familiar with it. Hyderabad (also Chennai, Pune, Gurgaon, NOIDA) is growing like crazy and the costs are less than Bangalore.
The issue is not just cost though – companies weigh depth of local talent-pool, scalability of operations, and history of IP protection. Like it or not outsourcing to India is now an accepted best practice (VCs in Silicon Valley expect an India strategy when you raise money) – you won’t get fired for it. Outsource to Pakistan and you’re on your own.