Islamabad, June 6, 2007 - Today, IBM announced the opening of a Linux

Competency Center which it has donated to NUST Institute of Information

Technology (NIIT) http://www.niit.edu.pk, Rawalpindi. This Linux Competency

Center will help customers, students, developers and business partners in

Pakistan to experience and test Linux hands-on and to explore the benefits

of open standards-based computing. The Teach the Teachers program will span

several Universities and teachers will be trained at NIIT. In addition IBM

is extending its Scholars Program to offer free software, course material

and access to IBM Portals to major Universities in Pakistan.

As part of establishing the center, IBM has donated its range of enterprise

systems (including pSeries Unix Servers, Intel Processor-based xSeries and

BladeCenter servers, TotalStorage), Printers, PCs, CISCO equipment - all of

the hardware running on Linux SuSE deployed by IBM Global Technology

Services team. IBM will also provide free hardware and software services for

the first year. In addition, IBM Middleware software will be used by NIIT in

their curriculum for graduate and undergraduate students under IBM Academic

Initiative program.

"Linux is the Game Changer and IBM believes that open standards and open

source technologies are a key driver of collaborative innovation" said

Humayun Bashir, Country General Manager, IBM Pakistan.

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