The Institute of Business Administration, Karachi will be the first university in Pakistan to offer SAP education as a part of its curriculum at undergraduate and graduate levels when it signed an alliance agreement with SAP on February 9, 2009. The collaboration will line up SAP’s University Alliances Program (UAP) with IBA’s ERP Academic Alliances Program (EAAP) and pave the way for IBA to offer SAP training on its campus in Karachi.

The agreement with SAP UAP will help in bridging the gap between academia and industry. This project will facilitate IBA in accomplishing its goal of producing highly skilled managers and entrepreneurs with greater field knowledge and technology experience.

Dr. Ishrat Husain, the Dean & Director IBA shared his vision of having IBA ranked among the top 100 global business schools and top 10 business schools in the Middle East and South Asia region within the next five years. The IBA-SAP agreement proves to be a milestone in this direction and is part of multi-dimensional uplift reform introduced in IBA recently.

Mr. Syed Sajjad, Managing Director of SAP Pakistan, said that SAP is committed to training IT specialists for the future and preparing them for the industry and market through the UAP. Through the UAP, which SAP is introducing on a global level, SAP aims to develop a talented pool of competitive infocomm professionals in an industry that is facing a severe talent crunch.

Dr. Sayeed Ghani, Associate Dean, Faculty of Computer Science, emphasized that the agreement with SAP will provide a competitive edge especially to the MBA MIS students who will achieve highly marketable skills with greater process/domain knowledge and using cutting edge enterprise solutions.

This collaboration which is being led by Mr. Imran Khan, Project Manager ERP Academic Alliances Program (EAAP)/Faculty of CCS, will further enable both IBA and SAP to overcome the upcoming challenges of the industry. Introduction of the world’s leading ERP solution will also give IBA graduates and faculty an edge to attain a hands-on experience of the best implementation practices around the globe. ERP consultants are in great demand in Pakistan and abroad, and the IBA-SAP initiative will provide new career opportunities to IBA graduates.

About SAP

SAP is the world’s leading provider of business software, offering applications and services that enable companies of all sizes and in more than 25 industries to become best-run businesses. With around 75,000 customers in over 120 countries, SAP is listed on several exchanges, including the Frankfurt stock exchange and NYSE, under the symbol “SAP.” (For more information, visit www.sap.com)
(*) SAP defines business software as comprising enterprise resource planning and related applications.