‘Lanka could be promoted as IT hub’

H.D.H Senewiratne

Sri Lanka could be promoted as an IT hub in the region because of its skilled work force and English educated population, IFS Vice President South Asia, Jayantha De Silva said.

“Since the country situation is conducive to do business, the government is now in the process of promoting IT and Business Process Outsourcing (BOP). Becuasae it has a lot of potential to become a hub in the region and also to become a US $ one billion industry in the future,” De Silva who is also the Managing Director IFS Sri Lanka told the Daily News Business.

He said that IFS one of the first foreign direct companies has now provided employment opportunities for more than 750 youth. It is now in the process of expanding its operations in Sri Lanka as an aid to the government’s IT/Knowledge hub concept in Sri Lanka.

De Silva said their main business was Enterprise Resource Planning (FRP) involved in various industries including business analysis, software engineering and production engineering. He said that their task is to do Research and Development (R&D)for top 300 global companies and 80,000 IFS customers worldwide. Sri Lanka could be considered as one of the best in the world. Therefore, for the better interest of the industry they promote best business practices within the company, he said.

Further, IFS plans to keep on enhancing their projects on an ERP platform round the clock with the support of their other global supporting system with the “work any where concept.” Under these circumstances the calibre of our people fit the global environment due to our skills, he added.

De Silva also said that 2013 would be a decisive year because the budget has given a lot of incentives for the IT sector by reducing taxes on IT industry and bandwidth charges. He also said that with this government support the IT sector will become the largest foreign exchange earning industry by 2020. In the macro level the government should address the problem where capabilities of our people are concerned. Then only we could achieve our set targets,” he added.

IFS is a Swedish based company and its applications is a single integrated product supporting the management of core processes namely service and asset, manufacturing, projects and supply chain.

The company with deep industry knowledge and software for critical business processes such as financial and Human Resources and provides complete ERP solution for all business needs.