One of Sri Lanka’s cutting-edge tech companies, iTelaSoft, recently announced its second consecutive year of rapid growth following the entry of former Navantis Chief Executive Officer, Indaka Raigama, as its CEO.
Raigama has a unique track record of setting up teams and penetrating to newer markets and technology frontiers in his role. Graduating from the Engineering Faculty of the University of Moratuwa in 1998, he has worked on software engineering, IT consulting, managing projects, and successfully running enterprises for the last two decades. His wealth of prior experience at Virtusa and Navantis has shaped his personality to successfully face the challenges of growing a tech company. As a former director at SLASSCOM, he has contributed in no mean measure to grow the IT industry by popularising IT careers among the young generation and penetrating to remote areas in Sri Lanka. Indaka joined iTelaSoft last year with the intention to grow the operation in the right direction.
iTelaSoft co-founder Ravindra Samarasinghe said: “When Indaka joined the organisation in early 2016, it had less than twelve employees, but he demonstrated the company’s ability to provide complex solutions to many clients around the world. His dedication, with tremendous support from his team, means the organisation is today a team of more than 60 engineering professionals, serving successfully numerous customers in Australia, UK, USA, and Canada.”
“Another growing business opportunity is providing highly skilled talent to these markets who are continuously looking to improve productivity. These dedicated teams are growing to cater for the ever-growing demand of product evolution, professional services, and process automation. With Indaka’s guidance and strategic thinking, we were able to reach global markets and diversify our offerings,” Samarasinghe added.
Addressing a gala event iTelaSoft held recently to celebrate the success of 2017 and cascading the plan for 2018 along with its employees and partners, Raigama said: “iTelaSoft had its ambitious beginning seven years back, to become a cutting-edge tech company with world-wide presence. Two years back, when I joined iTelaSoft, I wanted to fully focus on that mission. During the past years we have built very innovative solutions using cutting-edge technology stacks, delivering significant value to our customers. My passion has been to build teams, organisations, and products that I can be proud of. I strongly believe that the culture and values of an organisation have a significant impact on its achievements. As a team, we will be focusing on our talent base, competencies, and the culture to become a world-class technology provider.”
iTelaSoft is an IT services provider and software products development company, specialising in IT strategy consultation, design, development, and management of products, along with helping entrepreneurs transform ground-breaking ideas into successful products. The company was started with just one employee in 2010,targeting business from Australia. The co-founders set the goal to take the organisation global with world-class standards using local talent.
iTelaSoft works with many business domains including telco, fintech, eLearning, and retail. Already, the organisation has supported a few disruptive ideas to become real-world products.One of the niche areas of iTelaSoft is the Internet of Things (IoT), and, in most markets, IoT is growing at a rapid pace.
Addressing the gala event, Open University of Sri Lanka Senior Lecturer and Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA) Director, Dr. Ajith Madurapperuma, expressed his pleasure to see young technology companies in Sri Lanka building cutting-edge solutions for top brands in the world. He stressed the fact that we have to be in a full-time learning mind-set to be relevant in the world market. Being only literate is not enough as a nation; we need to be technology literate and culturally literate to understand how to build products that become applicable to the rest of the world.
Raigama also lauded the country’s intention to become a prime technology hub in South Asia, commenting: “Sri Lanka’s ICT exports are expected to reach $5 billion by 2020. Initiatives such as knowledge-based social market economy, an export-oriented economy, Western Region Megapolis, Smartcities etc. will propel the country’s IT industries as never seen before. Export revenue of the Sri Lankan IT sector skyrocketed from $213 million in 2007 to US$720 million in 2013, and then reached $1 billion in 2016. Sri Lanka was ranked among the ‘Top 50 Outsourcing Destinations’ by AT Kearney, whilst Colombo was ranked among the ‘Top 20 Emerging Cities’ by Global Services Magazine. In addition,50% of the one million jobs projected by 2020 would come from information communication technology (ICT) along with tourism sectors as envisaged by the government.”
“We commend and support Sri Lanka’s ambition to become the IT and technology hub of the region. iTelaSoft is a great breeding ground for young talented graduates to complete their internship and start careers as they are exposed to a variety of subject areas, international businesses, and opportunities to work in real-life projects. So far, we have seen a really bright set of young minds joining our organisation. With such a talent pool and more organisations like iTelaSoft, Sri Lanka to become a niche IT hub in the region is no doubt achievable,” concluded a confident Raigama.
