UK-based IT firm Zaizi opens office in Colombo

Zaizi Asia Team at Office Launch

By Charumini de Silva

UK-based open source software consultancy firm Zaizi yesterday set up its Sri Lankan operations, giving a further boost to the growing ICT industry and skilled engineers.

It said the new office in Colombo was a forward looking investment into attracting and developing highly skilled software engineers.

Zaizi is a provider of IT services, specialised in content management, search​technologies​and business process solutions. It offers consulting, software development and managed services support. 

Right now the firm is servicing entirely in the EU and UK markets on Government, healthcare and financial services. Zaizi’s key clients includes UK’s Department of Education, Ministry of Justice, Oxfam International, Deutsche Bank, and Eurostar.

The new office has employed around 40 youth. Prior to setting up fully-fledged operations, Zaizi annually recruited around 10 to 15 graduates from Sri Lanka.

During the past five years of operations in Sri Lanka Zaizi has invested over Rs. 100 million (Pounds 0.5 million) and capitalising on its growth, the firm intends to make significant investments in the immediate future as well.

“In opening this new office, it provides us a great environment to hire new graduates and developers, provide knowledge and industry expertise, run meet ups and provide better collaboration in working with colleagues in the UK,” Zaizi CEO Aingaran Pillai said after the opening of the office, at which the Chief Guest was UK Trade and Investment Head Gary Leslie.

Zaizi Asia Director Gane Kumaraswamy said: “The substantial growth in the number of graduates with technical expertise and digital skills in Sri Lanka over the last few years has enabled us to take on-board great new talent at Zaizi, who are providing support and services to some of the largest corporations across globe.»

«We are thrilled to be opening this new office and providing world-class facilities to our staff as well as be able to service our customers to the best of our ability,” he added.

The new office boasts modern meeting rooms with video conferencing, to enable collaborative working with globally-diverse colleagues and customers.

Noting that the education system in Sri Lanka was of a high standard, Zaizi CEO Pillai pointed out that finding skilled software developers and engineers in the UK was one of the key challenges the firm was facing at present.  

“The graduates who are passing out from national universities in Sri Lanka are very talented, but they require the essential industrial training and exposure to deal in the international arena. The challenge for us going forward is recruiting, training, mentoring and motivating the best engineers both in the UK and Sri Lanka,” he said.

Outlining their long-term plans in Sri Lanka, he said the company was quite interested in collaborating with the Government in its digital transformation and was currently reaching out to ICTA to work with some of these agencies.

However, he said the Government of Sri Lanka had still not gone into the mindset of software subscription and the procedures were quite tedious.

The firm is hopeful that in the near future it will be in a position to work with the Government of Sri Lanka in its digital transformation.

“In Sri Lanka our plans are on any regulated sector, but predominantly on banking and Government sector,” he added.

Pix by Sameera Wijesinghe

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