ISLAMABAD: The National Telecommunication Corporation (NTC) has raised questions over Higher Education Commission’s (HEC) agreement with Microsoft Corporation and proposed an audit of the utilisation of the accounts from the last eight years.

Through a letter dated Oct 29 and addressed to the federal secretary education, NTC stated: “Arrangement [agreement with Microsoft] of HEC at such a high cost of $3 million is duplication/overlapping and loss to public exchequer which is not desirable.”

The NTC said renewal of the project around Dec 15 should be put on hold till the audit concludes.

Says agreement worth $3m is duplication, loss to public exchequer

“NTC can provide HEC a pay-as-you-grow model to cut costs according to actual utilisation and save the huge cost of $3 million,” read the letter available with Dawn.

According to it, HEC signed the Enterprise Academic Solution (EAS) Agreement with Microsoft Corporation for powerful innovation executions making universities of Pakistan ready towards an open, dynamic and current training framework and improve the mechanical limits of instructive organisations.

The NTC said the agreement with Microsoft for 200,000 users for all universities of Pakistan, paying three million dollars annually for the last eight years. But it is only using merely 10 to 15 per cent of the accounts because of Covid-19.

The letter added: “All universities have been created under one tenant and the users are visible to each other. For example, one university can see the students/users of the other university and the recorded lectures go to HEC’s account, making it difficult to differentiate which recording belongs to which university and which course etc.

NTC is the only SPLA service provider in Pakistan to provide Microsoft licences on pay-as-you-grow model on a monthly subscription to save the cost of huge foreign exchange.”

When contacted, HEC’s spokesperson Aayesha Ikram stated that NTC letter was based on false assumption.

“HEC does not have 200,000 licences, utilisation is higher than the number of paid MS licences, and there is no duplication/overlap in our Microsoft agreement.”

She said: “We believe that our MS licensing agreement has extremely competitive pricing terms. In addition, our partnership with Microsoft under the Education Transformation Framework Agreement has benefited both students and faculty through capacity building, skill certification, outreach campaigns and the annual Imagine Cup competition,” she added.

She said HEC provides ICT services to over 300 higher education institutes in the country. “Shifting all the services to NTC would require a significant amount of effort and it would be irresponsible to do so without a viable plan,” she said.

“NTC must provide the same services at a cheaper rate and ensure a smooth transition for this to be a worthwhile endeavour. We have had discussions with NTC on this topic before and have not received any actionable plans,” the spokesperson said.

She said the project is not costly rather HEC receives special educational pricing, adding the number of licences required every year were based on demand from universities and additional licences were only added if universities requested them (pay as you grow).

“Under the terms of our agreement with MS, only faculty/staff licences are required and student licences are provided at no additional cost (up to 1.5 million students). Currently, the number of office 365 licences for faculty/staff under the contract are 82,000,” she said and added that from a utilisation perspective, post-Covid, on the MS Teams platform alone, there are over 700,000 users.

Universities have the option to request for their separate tenants and a few universities are already on their own tenants, she said.

Published in Dawn, December 13th, 2020