Sri Lanka is at the very early stages of an economic boom and therefore a technology boom, according to Mani Kulasooriya, a Founder / Director of Business Development of the recently launched local IT consultancy Latitude655.
Further, he suggested there was a lack of professional IT services companies to effectively support this anticipated technology boom, noting that the local engineering talent can be currently characterised as 'uncut gems'.
While indicating that Latitude655 would be investing US$ 5 million locally over five years to build up their business with the goal of becoming the number one IT services company in Sri Lanka, Mr. Kulasooriya further noted that Laitude655's key differentiator from the many IT companies that operate locally is that, while many send their staff abroad to gain experience, Latitude655 would be the only one to bring Silicon Valley talent to Sri Lankan shores to reduce the technology adoption lag for local clients from the three to four years which is the domestic norm today to a more acceptable three to four months.
Further, according to the company's Chief Technology Officer, Chetan Narsude; the technologies being 'incubated' by Latitude655 includes mobile, including home automation (using smart phones to tie into closed circuit television footage and provide remote access to approved visitors), translation (real time translations from English to Japanese or any other language and vice versa using mobile devices) and social networking, all part of the mobile platform which is expected to grow even faster since smart phones sales have already overtaken laptops from the 3rd quarter of 2009. Latitude655 will also offer cloud computing services, an architecture which enables smaller software developers to keep startup costs low by only buying the what they need in terms of online storage space, software, etc.; with Mr. Narsude further suggesting that clients using 'non cloud' can be changed to 'cloud' in a matter of days. |
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