Sri Lanka’s first agriculture-based app to run on Microsoft Azure

Friday, 14 February 2020 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Hasitha Abeywardena (left) and Suren Kohombange at the Govipola launch

Govipola, the cloud-based mobile app designed to facilitate direct selling platforms for fruit and vegetable farmers – a move aimed at cutting out middlemen and containing food inflation in Sri Lanka, will run on Microsoft Azure, a collection of cloud-based services for building reliable, scalable, and maintainable applications. The platform lowers the total cost of ownership on physical hardware and services from not having to manage IT infrastructure to deal with hosting, data security, and hardware maintenance.

Govipola is owned by Croptronix, an agri-tech company committed to the sustainability of farming in Sri Lanka. The company contracted Fortunaglobal to develop the app and deploy it on Microsoft Azure’s cloud and edge computing solutions. Fortunaglobal is a single vendor based in Colombo pioneering a wave of digital banking solutions that promote financial inclusion.

“Microsoft Azure decreased Govipola’s time to deployment and reduced Croptronix’s expenses on physical infrastructure and maintenance, said Fortunaglobal Founder/CEO Suren Kohombange. At Fortunaglobal, we’re committed to empowering businesses with inclusive technology like Microsoft Azure and leading the connectivity and access rates of their customers.” Farmers who sell produce on Govipola now have access to a fair, transparent, mobile marketplace that offers higher prices for their goods.

In the past, they often lost money, time, and products because sales depended on multiple layers of brokers to get their goods to markets and wholesale vendors.

Moving forward, Croptronix plans to build intelligence into the app by implementing Microsoft Azure’s AI + Machine Learning and Analytics services to derive actionable insights and measure product performance. “At Microsoft, we believe any business should be able to integrate our open and flexible cloud computing platform,” said Microsoft Sri Lanka and Maldives Country Manager Hasitha Abeywardena. “Our partners have been doing a great job helping our customers to modernise their environments, to make a lot of those moves into the cloud.

Poverty among rural farmers in Sri Lanka has been a particularly difficult problem to solve. That’s where Govipola and Microsoft Azure can make a difference as they reinvent both ends of the retail value chain.”

Microsoft Azure provides a range of cloud services, including those for Compute, Analytics, Storage, AI + Machine Learning, Networking, and Hybrid. Users can pick and choose from these services to develop and scale new applications, or run existing applications, in the public cloud. For a full directory of Azure Cloud Services, visit https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/.