Bringing innovative business solutions to stakeholders on a single platform

A collaboration of innovative solutions in ICT and market front-runners in their field focused on futuristic tech governance that creates sustainable outcomes for every business – ‘JIT Solutions Day 2015’, was exactly that forum. ‘JIT Solutions Day 2015’ showcased best of breed solutions through JIT’s strategic global principals, which covered all sectors in Sri Lanka. 

This forum highlighted how strategic business solutions could significantly enhance an organisation’s performances and profits. The diverse focus areas from infrastructure to automation delivered networks, geographical information systems to big data, mobility payments to business process management and even the current burning issue of cyber security which can be entirely taken care of holistically and in a result oriented manner – truly conveyed the essence of all digital offerings.

Important factors in today’s business environment

Welcoming the delegates and invitees was JIT Group Group CEO Dr. Vickum Senanayake, who highlighted the factors of importance in today’s business environment in speed to market, cost containment, business continuity, and customer experience. 

Setting the pace for the main session speakers and the sector focused break-out sessions, he discussed the importance of these factors and how JIT Group together with their long standing principal relationships, were to help its valued customers address the challenges effectively, as proven through nearly 19 years in the business.

IT industry’s unprecedented transformation

Michael Leung, Specialty Sales Director of Strategy APJ, of EMC, delivering the keynote titled ‘Power of the EMC Federation,’ spoke of the unprecedented transformation the IT industry was facing, focused around four key pillars: Applications, Mobility, Big Data, and the Cloud. He highlighted how IT organisations worldwide are now struggling with transforming their existing organisations into the Platform 3 world, with the focus on increasing efficiency, and reducing costs. He further discussed the use of EMC’s technologies and solutions centred around; XtremIO, Isilon and VBLock in perspective of helping to mitigate these challenges.

Information security and cybercrime

Taking over from Michael Leung, was Ron Wee, Regional Business Director, Security Analytics and ASOC, South East Asia RSA – The Security Division of EMC. Ron shifted the focus of the audience to one of the biggest challenges the world faces today; information security and cybercrime. He stressed the importance of proactive monitoring and the use of tools and solutions from RSA that enables IT administrators to take a holistic view of events and activities. This visibility enables businesses to use big data analytics to build meaning from the wealth of network information and identify security threats.

With visibility into what happens on networks, and the analysis to determine what kind of risks businesses are facing, businesses can then take the right actions, according to Ron, to prioritise the biggest threats to the organisation. 

Ron also spoke on how the current information security industry was caught in a “dark age” because many organisations felt that the current “advanced” security measures were infallible. To overcome this, he said that we needed to adopt a level of visibility everywhere, from the endpoint to the cloud; that user identities would become key to securing business; external threat intelligence would become even more valuable than it has been before; but critically, businesses needed to understand what was the most critical to their mission in order to know what to defend.

Simplification, automation, and analytics

Pankaj Kitchlu, Service Provider Systems Engineering Leader, India & SAARC, Juniper Networks, making his presentation stated that the combination of NFV and SDN breaks the service silo model and lowers the relative cost of capital assets through the use of commercial-off-the-shelf hardware and software, resource pooling, network visibility, and analytics. 

“Simplification, automation, and analytics achieve operational benefits by reducing the costs associated with manual and complex processes. As the costs and complexities of offering network-based services are reduced, new competitors will enter the market seeking to cherry-pick the highest margin and most lucrative customers. It is likely that they will marginalise the connectivity portion of the network (as has already been seen for many consumer services) and retain control of the cloud-based services that are most strategic to the higher value enterprise customer,” concluded Kitchlu.

The era of big data

Feroz D’Silva, Principal Consultant, Alliances, SAS, speaking on the era of big data, said that companies were finding it a challenge to analyse all the data that is generated. The traditional methods of reporting fall short when the categories of data are huge and the speed at which it is generated is very high. The row/column based tabular reports are too voluminous and the bar/line charts have more categories to display than they can handle. Hence, it is important to have dynamic visualisation over the entire set of data. 

SAS Visual Analytics plays a key role in enabling business to analyse the whole data with real time aggregation and categorisation of data. He presented scenarios where this visualisation helps to identify patterns and drilldown towards actionable intelligence for fraud management, social marketing, geo-location based sentiment analytics and supply chain optimisation.

 

Achieving operational excellence

JIT Group Group CTO Navin Seneviratne presented by introducing two subsidiary companies under JIT Group; TechSys and Integrated Business Process Outsourcing (iBPO) and their flagship development ‘iAgora’. He explained how the iAgora platform enables organisations in any industry to achieve operational excellence through the adoption of industry best practices as well as continuous process improvement. 

“The platform also features out of the box business content for IT Services Management best practices such as Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL). One of the key innovations of iAgora is the continuous release management or the ability to constantly refine given processes and deploy such without any downtime to operations. In addition, advanced features such as multilingualism, heterogeneous integration, reporting, user defined data structures and processes provide added business value to organisations without the need for custom software development. Whilst the platform comes as both Cloud and Enterprise editions, iAgora solutions also offers process design, systems integration, IT service delivery and process improvement as part of its total operational excellence solution offering,” concluded Seneviratne.

As a services oriented economy, JIT Group believes there is much potential and need for a similar solution in the sphere of e-government and good governance, IT and telco service delivery, BPO and banking sector process automation.

Geographical Information Systems

GIS Solutions, a Subsidiary of JIT Group, is the sole Authorised Distributor in Sri Lanka for ArcGIS Mapping Software Platform – considered the leading GIS (Geographical Information Systems) software platform in the world. It’s developer ESRI (Environmental Systems Research Institute. CA. USA) is a $ 1.4 b company, the largest global mapping software organisation. ArcGIS is the local market leader too in GIS with over 150+ client user organisations to its credit.  ArcGIS is the only comprehensively supported commercial GIS platform available locally.    

Making her presentation, Ashani Jayasinghe-Dabare, CEO of GIS Solutions stated, “Location or geography as we referred to in GIS is an often overlooked key aspect for any organisation be it government, public or private. Because Nearly 80% of all data has some reference to geography and you shouldn’t ignore it. A geographical and location perspective (i.e. map) can reveal a whole new  dimension  to an organisations operation that may not be apparent otherwise and analysing your competitors’ operations from a location point of view gives you key insights and visibility to develop a competitive advantage. But mostly, having one common picture (a digital map) of the entire organisation’s geographically diverse operation,  available to all key staff and decision makers, aid collaboration and better decision making – saving, time, money and cost and help resource optimisation which facilitate better planning. GIS Solutions has led to numerous quantified benefits. GIS can transform how we manage and drive our organisations that is why GIS is considered one of the three growth areas in ICT arena and ArcGIS is leading GIS field for the future in building smart communities,” stated GIS Solutions CEO Ashani Jayasinghe-Dabare.

Digital adoption in financial services

Digital adoption in financial services is increasing by leaps and bounds in various spheres of customer interaction. FIS, represented by Anirudh Raghavendra, Senior Solutions Architect – FIS Payment Solutions and Services, presented on ‘Digital Adoption: Future Proofing the Bank’. 

He commenced with laying the context in terms of the usage of digital channels, i.e., PC, phones, tablets, kiosks, etc., saying: “It is clear that these channels continue to evolve and co-exist with the brick and mortar network in banks. We foresee a future that will see a world of devices and gadgets that would evolve on the basis of customer preferences and adopt to suit changing living styles. On the bright side, we are almost at the beginning of the ‘Internet of Everything’, which is a new world of interconnected gadgets.

“However, there are challenges.  FIS has undertaken an extensive study in 2015 titled ‘FIS Consumer Banking Expectation Index’ across 9,000 consumers across nine countries. The findings from this study have given some interesting insights into customer expectations from digital channels in banks. At the lowest end, it includes basic banking requirements, and the customer expects these digital channels to evolve up the value chain into convenience and choice, needs fulfilment and empowerment and finally, a financial institution needs to enable a customer achieve his/her goals.” He concluded with a four point agenda for banks; digital convergence: integrated, multiform factor, device-relevant, rich feature functionality and user experience, Industry-leading capabilities for clients to customise, extend and differentiate (and leverage data), best-in-class security, risk management and service delivery.

Successful forum

Over 200 stakeholders from the banking and finance sector, telco sector, commercial sector and Government and defence sectors came together on this day, not only to have their business challenges addressed accurately, but also find a solution. This integration and convergence of all resources and initiatives optimised the synergy of this event, bringing everything from facts to figures, to assist decision making, to plan strategically, execute responsibly and track accountability. This event was all about good implementation and delivery of end-to-end ICT needs of Sri Lanka for businesses at large.

Information and Communication Technology is a powerful catalyst which facilitates the above seamlessly, effectively and efficiently on a simple and user-friendly digital platform. This exclusive event identified and bridged the gaps in the domain of ICT with a 360-degree based view and an understanding of best practices in the continuously evolving world of technology.