[Technology]

Sri Lankan software - our new international brand

By Gamini WARUSHAMANA

[email protected]

Ceylon tea and Ceylon cinnamon, the oldest Sri Lankan brands placed the country on top in the international market.

Thereafter our cricket team took the country to the international arena. Today, our talented young software engineers are building a new international Sri Lankan brand “Sri Lankan software”.

They have been successful in this exercise even under trying conditions by being suppliers to the world’s best software products or being reputed service providers.

Chairman of Codegen, a Sri Lankan software company, Dr. Harsha Subasinghe said that its flagship product TravelBox is the world’s number one software product in the travel and tourism industry.

“Codegen is a totally Sri Lankan software company and today we are in Europe, North America and the Australian markets and the world’s top airlines, travel operators, hotels and other businesses in the travel and tourism industry are running on our solution”, he said.

Subasinghe recalled the difficult path he traversed to make Codegen a success. Codgen was set up in 1999, with two people.

I did my Phd in artificial intelligence and as there was no opportunity in Sri Lanka to use my knowledge this led me to start Codegen. I had worked with Indian and Russian software engineers but had no experience about Sri Lankan software engineers. The third engineer who joined Codegen left a short while later, because the company was too small to retain people.

They did not see a future with us. This discouraged us but the first two persons who joined along with me are still here and they worked hard to bring Codegen to this level.

New technologies

From the inception our objective was to be a good R&D company and not a mere software company that does projects for other companies. We introduced new technologies to Sri Lanka. We first introduced open source technology commercially in Sri Lanka and used it in our products. During that time most of the developers used Microsoft technologies.

Later we introduced technologies such as CORBA and EJB commercially in Sri Lanka, again being the leader. With these technologies we gave a momentum to our universities, especially to the University of Moratuwa and the University of Peradeniya to produce good Sri Lankan software engineers.

However, we had to commence business with bespoke software, because we did not have venture capital or other source of investment and we earned money from bespoke software and used that money to develop our own products and R&D in parallel.

Automation of Colombo Port

The automation of the Colombo Port is one of our largest projects. Today the whole operation of the Colombo Port runs on our solution. RuBank is the banking solution of Codegen and today the Co-operative Banks use RuBank. However, today our business is mainly with foreign clients.

We have expertise in three domains; travel and tourism, online gaming and finance and banking. We are strictly limited in these three areas and are continuously doing R&D to improve our solutions.

TravelBox is one of our flagship products and we are proud of its success. The TravelBox made in Sri Lanka displays the talents of our software engineers. It is a complete web based solution.

Travel and tourism is rapidly changing the complex industry and putting it in a service oriented technology was challenging. TravelBox is a corporate solution suitable for large business organisations, Dr. Subasinghe said.

The implementation of the TravelBox is also a huge task and Codegen jointly undertakes the implementation work with the client and trains people to run the solution.

TraveBox automates the whole business system and as a result our clients get massive benefits after implementation with efficiency improvement resulting in a revenue increase.

Since travel and tourism is a very dynamic industry there must be strong intelligence behind the solution, but at the same time the solution should be viable and at low cost. The TravelBox which is evolving has all these features.

Challenging area

Online gaming is another challenging area. When we started R&D in this domain there were no experts in the country. We were anxious to do challenging and risky projects. Apart from that there is a huge market for online gaming. However, the technical side is very critical, he said.

Dr. Subasinghe said that Codegen is a strong global company today with clients all around the world and strong partnerships with reputed IT companies such as Oracle, IBM and HP. Today it has around 130 software engineers. Codegen has moved to its new premises at Braybrooke Place with the objective of further expansion. Codgens’ head office is in London and is responsible for sales and implementation while all developments are done at the R&D centre in Sri Lanka.

Today Codegen earns around sterling pounds 750,000 in foreign exchange annually from its products and services and hopes to increase it to sterling pounds five million in the coming years.

Commenting on Sri Lanka’s software industry, he said, “Sri Lanka has a future in the software industry because our software engineers are more business-minded and talented. The situation in the country is improving.

The number of graduates passing out is on the increase. But it is very important to maintain the quality of the engineers. However, the cost of electricity and telecommunication is still high and this adversely affects our competitiveness.

The industry should be ethical and stop hunting talented people for competitive salaries. Or else the salaries would artificially increase affecting the growth of the industry”.

Codegen is planning to expand its markets by setting up offices in Australia, Canada and Dubai. It has also planned to enter the energy sector. The company has plans to run its servers on solar power soon and invest on energy saving solutions as well.