MCAST institute wins award for ICT work

Crimsonwing (Malta) Ltd and the MCAST Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering (formerly the Fellenberg Training Centre for Industrial Electronics) were presented with the Grant Thornton Awards for Enterprise and for Foreign Direct Investment.

The awards were presented by the Minister for Investment, Industry and Information Technology Austin Gatt at a ceremony at Le Meridien Phoenicia, in Floriana.

Now in their fourth edition, the awards are given annually to two individuals or organisations. The theme this year was Information and Communications Technology.

The Fellenberg Centre was set up in 1974 as a cooperation project between the Maltese and Swiss governments.

Some 800 Fellenberg electronics technicians were trained at this centre of excellence until it was incorporated into the Malta College of Arts Science and Technology in recent years.

Together with those that have gone through the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and the Institute of Information and Communications Technology at MCAST, they constitute the human resources backbone of the country's electronics industry and related services, including the IT sector.

Crimsonwing (Malta) Ltd, a provider of software solutions and software development services, was set up in 1996 and is part of the Crimsonwing Group with offices in the UK and the Netherlands.

Malta is the group's solutions base. The company devotes about five per cent of its turnover to research and development, is ISO 9001:2004 certified and in May of this year was appointed Microsoft Business Solutions Partner.

Mario Vella, the head of Grant Thornton Malta's foreign direct investment and international business services, said one of the awards was given to firms which distinguished themselves for their entrepreneurship and for their confidence in Malta as a competitive location for export oriented foreign direct investment.

Awardees in this category were chosen because they would have excelled in those characteristics that distinguished the majority of successful firms in Malta, which depended on the challenges and opportunities of the international market.

The other award was given to organisations and individuals who, in some way or another, promoted the growth and development of Malta's entrepreneurial economy.

The awards in the past were given to, among others, the ambassadors of Tunisia, Abdessalam Hetira, and of the United States, Kathryn Proffitt.

Grant Thornton (Malta) managing partner Martin Bonello-Cole said during the award ceremony that the ICT theme was chosen since economic development, especially in the productive sectors of the national economy and in the sector oriented towards the export of goods and services, was now irreversibly welded to the development of ICT capabilities and capacities.

Nathan Goode, project finance director at the Glasgow office of Grant Thornton, spoke about the Private Public Partnership solution to the financing of large ICT projects, and Joe Pullicino, Grant Thornton IT partner, addressed the guests on the firm's contribution to the development of Maltese firms IT capabilities.