The COO who keeps coming back to Pakistan

Born in Lahore, rooted in a family of scholars and doctors

The episode opens with Muzamil welcoming Asif Akram inside Studio 77, Systems Limited’s design studio in Lahore — the first time the show had filmed outside its regular studio setup. The setting matters: it signals something about the guest’s world before a word is spoken.

Asif traces his roots to a family that valued learning across disciplines. His great-grandfather was a mathematician and poet whose name is on a road in Lahore. His maternal grandfather was a heart specialist. His father was a medical doctor. His mother was president of the Lahore chapter of the All Pakistan Women Association. One of his uncles, Dr. Amjad Pervez, is both a PhD and a well-known singer. “So if you know in Lahore there is this Australia Chowk,” Asif says, “that’s my great grandfather — he was famous for mathematics and poetry.”

He attended Saint Anthony’s, a Catholic school on Lawrence Road, from 1978 through metric in 1987. “Very strict,” he recalls. “The memories are very good education, very disciplined.” From there he went to Forman Christian College, where he completed an FSC and then a BSc in maths, stats, and physics — the path of someone who had wanted engineering but hadn’t made the cut at UET.

The visa that nobody expected to come through

During the gap between FSC and BSc, Asif stumbled into a computer science institute that had just opened in Lahore. He took evening courses, developed a fascination with programming, and quietly filed that interest away. Then a friend mentioned that an agency in Lahore had a relationship with a university in Indiana and was issuing I-20 forms for US student visas.

His parents were certain it would come to nothing. He was nearly certain himself. He rode a CD-70 to the American consulate at 2:30 in the morning to be near the front of the queue. The interview lasted five minutes. The officer was filing her nails while she spoke to him. “I remember it like really, really clearly,” Asif says. Then she told him to have a seat and that she would stamp his visa.

He went home. His mother started crying. His father was shocked. Six months later, in August 1991, he landed in the United States for the first time in his life — a nineteen or twenty-year-old with one week between getting the visa and the departure date, heading to Indiana with no real plan.

Funding an education from cafeteria shifts to Seven-Eleven double shifts

The Indiana winter drove him south. After one year, he transferred to the University of Houston, where he completed his computer science degree. The more consequential story, though, is how he paid for it.

From a middle-class family with limited funds, Asif worked in the university cafeteria, then at an Arby’s near campus, then on the McDonald’s breakfast shift — arriving at 4 AM to work the grill before morning classes. He worked at gas stations. He ran for president of the International Student Organization, partly because the role came with in-state tuition fees, which dropped his semester costs from several thousand dollars to around twelve hundred. “It was better than a scholarship,” he says simply.

During his MBA in Management Information Systems — which he pursued because he was drawn to the intersection of business and technology, not because he had a clear plan — he added weekend double shifts at a Seven-Eleven owned by a Pakistani. Saturday morning to night, Sunday morning to night, on top of twenty hours a week at the multicultural center and his evening classes. “Mopping the bathrooms to… you learn that no work is bad work,” he says. “Kaam kaam hai.”

He graduated with a 3.9 GPA and was the valedictorian of his MBA class. His father, visiting Texas for the first time, watched him walk across the stage.

Returning to Pakistan in 1997 with no job and no plan

In June 1997, with no green card, no job offer, and no particular reason he can articulate, Asif packed up, sold his car, and moved back to Lahore. The IT boom was accelerating in the US. Y2K was approaching. “People said, yaar, abhi yahan boom aaya hua hai,” he recalls. He left anyway.

Lahore in 1997 had almost nothing in the way of IT employment. No telcos beyond PTC. Banks and government offices in Karachi. By August he still had no job. Then his mother dropped his CV — with a Shell contact’s card attached — at Abacus, a consulting firm with a relationship with Coopers and Lybrand. He got a call two days later and started in September 1997.

At Abacus, he implemented an ERP system built in FoxPro across thirty to forty organizations in eighteen months — textiles, airlines, pharmaceuticals, Johnson and Johnson. “Business ko samjha, technology to aati thi,” he says. It was his second foundational education, after the US.

When Coopers and Lybrand merged with Price Waterhouse in 1997 to form PricewaterhouseCoopers, Abacus became the consulting arm of PWC Pakistan. A project in Saudi Arabia with STC followed in 1999, and Asif was selected. He got engaged in June, told his future father-in-law he was leaving for Riyadh the following month, and managed the reaction. He got married in October. His wife joined him in Saudi Arabia shortly after.

IBM, Dubai, Islamabad, and the Margalla Towers earthquake

PWC’s consulting division was acquired by IBM in 2002. Asif didn’t switch companies — the company switched around him. He became IBM. He was in Dubai from 2001 to 2005, working on e-government projects with Dubai Municipality under Sheikh Mohammed’s early digital push. He became a team leader, then a project manager.

In 2005, with a second son born and family pulling him back, he moved to Islamabad to join IBM’s Global Business Services division. He rented an apartment on the third floor of the last tower in the Margalla Towers complex — the one facing the hills. He enrolled his son in Beaconhouse. He drove to Lahore nearly every weekend.

On the night of October 7, 2005, he left Islamabad early because he wasn’t feeling well and his sister had arranged an iftar in Lahore. The earthquake hit the next morning. His tower fell. “Allah ta’ala ne us waqt behteri ki,” he says quietly, “that we were not there.”

Muzamil, who grew up in the same sector and used to visit the broken towers as a schoolboy, pauses at this moment in the conversation.

Building IBM’s Global Delivery Center in Lahore — from 11 people to 500

By 2007, Asif had moved IBM’s operations to Lahore, where the company had almost no presence. He built the IBM Global Delivery Center there from scratch. “When I joined IBM consulting, we were eleven people,” he says. Within three years, the team had grown to over 500. He interviewed the first fifty himself. Clients included Jazz, Civil Aviation, Shell, Askari Bank, and PTCL.

In 2010, his mentor Sriram Viswanathan — who would later become CEO of IBM UK — convinced him to return to Dubai as the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan country leader for GBS. He took his two sons, then aged ten and five, out of school and moved again.

By 2015 he was General Manager for Middle East, Africa, and Turkey — eighteen offices, over seventy countries, a team of around 200 people and several hundred million dollars in revenue. IBM promoted him to Vice President. “In IBM world, four hundred and fifty thousand people at that time, there were less than two thousand vice presidents,” he tells Muzamil. “So big deal again.”

He was also elected to IBM’s global transformation team, a group of 300 senior IBMers working on strategy initiatives led by the chairman. “Na khali MIA run kar rahe the, kuch ho raha tha,” he says.

Leaving IBM, losing his father, and finding Systems Limited

In 2017, with his father’s health declining in Dubai, Asif made the decision to return to Lahore again. He came back in January 2018 as IBM’s global sales leader for cloud applications, working from Lahore with a team in Dublin and India. He left IBM entirely in August 2018. His father passed away in October 2018.

“We will figure it out,” he says of the decision to leave without a job lined up. He established a company called Growth Mindset Consulting — a name that reflects what he describes as a lifelong anchor — and took on a few clients. Systems Limited approached him to consult on their Middle East growth. He joined part-time in November 2018, then full-time in 2020 as COO.

“The reason I joined them is this group has a great vision. They’re a hungry group,” he says. “They have a growth mindset but they’re hungry as well. They’re not getting satisfied with what they are — and that was a very intriguing factor.”

From 1,000 people to 3,500 — and the vision for 25,000

Later in the discussion, Muzamil asks Asif to describe what he found when he arrived at Systems and what he has been building. The numbers are striking. When Asif joined, professional services headcount was around 800 to 1,000. Today it is 3,500. Total Pakistan headcount, including the BPO division, is around 5,000. The company has doubled every year for the last three years.

The stated ambition is to become Pakistan’s first 25,000-person technology company — the country’s equivalent of Wipro, HCL, Tata Consultancy, or Accenture. “Pakistan mein bhi ek Accenture type ki company ban sakti hai,” Asif says. “I think systems is the only company that has the footprint and the muscle.”

On processes, he is direct. He describes a spectrum from zero to eighty, where state-owned companies operate at twenty and IBM or Teradata operate at sixty to eighty. “We are somewhere in the middle at forty, fifty, trying to get to that sixty to eighty.” The work has been implementation — clear policies, no exceptions — while staying nimble enough not to slow down the way large global firms sometimes do.

The supply problem that no one can solve alone

By the end of the conversation, Muzamil steers toward the macro. The demand side for Pakistani IT is not the problem. The supply side is. Asif agrees without hesitation.

His argument is structured and specific. For every billion dollars of IT exports, you need roughly 25,000 people working. Pakistan is currently at three to three-and-a-half billion dollars in exports. “You can do the math,” he says. “Am not gonna comment on whether we have twenty-five thousand — we don’t.”

The freelance boom, he argues, will plateau. It happened in India. The economics of a talent war — where companies keep doubling salaries to poach from each other — are not sustainable. What is sustainable is the academy model: companies building internal training institutes that take people from any background, test for problem-solving ability, and train them on tools. “Language to badlti rahegi,” he says. “Tools bazar mein aate hain. FoxPro, COBOL, now Python, Kubernetes — jo bhi aa raha hai. So you get that person and then make sure the brain is there.”

He is equally pointed about where investment is missing. Large Pakistani business conglomerates are entering automobiles, textiles, and manufacturing. Almost none are entering IT services. “Saudi Arabia ki oil export ek sau pandrah billion dollar hai. India ki IT export ek sau pachaas billion dollar hai,” he says. “India’s IT has surpassed Saudi Arabia’s oil because there is no limit to it.” He calls directly on the business community to invest.

On Ukraine, he sees an immediate opportunity. Ukraine exports three to four billion dollars in IT services. That work is now displaced. “Kuch hamare paas bhi aayega,” he says. “Abhi nahi aayega, kuch mahine lagenge. You have to be ahead of the curve.”

His closing answer to Muzamil’s question about Pakistan in 2050 is grounded in the same logic. The demographic split — 63% of the population under thirty — is a gold mine that no other country currently has. The strategic geography matters. But the mindset shift required is to decouple from external dependency. “Kennedy ne kaha tha na — do what you can do, don’t expect what others can do for you. Humein is soch ko decouple karna hai.” Invest in leadership. Invest in people. Walk the talk. Don’t be satisfied.