ASI Names Armughan Rafat Chief Technology Officer

TREVOSE, PA – October 3, 2011 – The Advertising Specialty Institute, the largest education, media and marketing organization serving the advertising specialty industry, today announced it has named Armughan Rafat its new chief technology officer.

Mr. Rafat is now responsible for the development, QA and infrastructure teams that support all ASI products and services.

At ASI, Mr. Rafat reports to Timothy M. Andrews, president and chief executive officer.

“I am extremely excited to welcome Armughan Rafat to ASI as its chief technology officer,” said Andrews. “He is a technology visionary with extraordinarily relevant experience who will help continue ASI’s tradition of designing, developing and offering the best products in the industry.”

Mr. Rafat is a senior IT professional who has led organizations serving clients ranging from small start-up businesses to large multinational corporations. Since 2006, Mr. Rafat has been at Thomson Reuters, most recently as vice president of technology and global head of collections and editorial technology. He was responsible for architecture, technology development, quality assurance and support for investment banking and news technology platforms used by thousands of financial professionals worldwide.

Prior to Thomson Reuters, Mr. Rafat spent five years at Liberty Travel and GOGO Worldwide Vacations, a family-owned company that serves both direct customers and travel agents, where he served as senior director of enterprise architecture. Mr. Rafat was instrumental in designing and delivering a new technology platform that supported the direct employees of companies, the e-commerce business for direct consumers and a travel search engine for over 18,000 independent travel agencies across North America. He drove the development of numerous sales-building and educational initiatives for travel agents, including personalized newsletter and event planning tools as well as a computer-based training portal.

Mr. Rafat is also a member of the Enterprise Architecture Center of Excellence organization and a certified enterprise architect and practitioner. He is a hobbyist lecturer and often presents at technical seminars, workshops and conferences. He also has published articles for well-known technology magazines.

With his employers, Mr. Rafat has filed two patents, and his teams have several other patents pending. He is certified for the Microsoft, Sun and Oracle platforms.

Mr. Rafat earned his bachelor’s degree in computer technology from Karachi University; a master’s degree in software engineering from the Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology; and an executive master’s in technology management from Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, where he lives with his wife and three children.

For more information, contact Dawn Marie, manager of public relations, at 215-953-3119 or [email protected].

About ASI
The Advertising Specialty Institute (ASI) is the largest media, marketing and education organization serving the promotional products industry, with a network of over 26,000 distributors and suppliers throughout North America. ASI leads the industry in technology solutions, providing cloud-based e-commerce, enterprise resource planning software (ERP) and customer relationship management software (CRM). ESP Web is the industry’s leading tool for sourcing hundreds of thousands of products. A family-owned business since 1962, ASI also provides online research, marketing, advertising opportunities, trade shows, education, award-winning magazines, newsletters, custom websites and catalogs to help members sell, market and promote their brands. Visit ASI at www.asicentral.com and on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and the CEO’s blog.