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APAC CIO outlook magazine published from the hub of technology – Silicon Valley, USA and is a leading IT magazine designed to connect stakeholders within and across the enterprise IT community of APAC countries, with an aim to provide a knowledge share platform for CIOs, CTOs and other senior level IT industry decision makers along with CXOs to share their insights and advice with IT community of APAC countries.

Just In Time Group (JIT) is indeed proud of its achievement of being listed in the latest edition of the magazine and as the only Sri Lankan company to be featured and recognized in the APAC CIO outlook Magazine’s annual listing of the Top 25 Government & Public Sector Technology Providers 2017. This prestigious recognition for JIT is an echo of the commitment of the JIT Team’s efforts of delivering innovative solutions and service excellence, as a leader in systems and solutions integration in Sri Lanka – with a special mention to JIT’s ability to manage any customer challenge and achieve 100% User Acceptance Test (UAT) sign offs.

The APAC CIO Outlook editorial research team analyzed over 400+ companies who provide Gov. & Public Sector Technology solutions to shortlist the Top 25 companies in the Government & Public Sector Technology Providers 2017 – and companies who are at the forefront of tackling customer challenges. This edition of the APAC CIO Outlook magazine featured the top solution and service providers offering tech¬nologies and services in the government space – showcasing extensive business knowledge and innovative strategies combined with talent base across locations.

Governments and Public sectors are no longer like before, as now their horizon¬tal extent has multiplied unequivo¬cally and so has their dependence onto newer technologies to tread these new hori¬zons. As the new world is inundated by concerns such as; security threats, population proliferation and depleting resources, it will come to play that government agencies will become and must transition into major users of the newest disruptions that is hitting technology landscape.

JIT’s featured article on APAC CIO outlook Magazine, ‘Bringing Agility in the Workflow of Government Agencies’ shared that, “Technology has painted a new reality for the market today: a reality governed by the adage ‘deliver more for less’. To adjust to this new reality the Government and public sector have been heavily infusing leading edge technology to meet their core business needs. Helping them seamlessly adapt to the change, is the Colombo-based company, Just in Time Group (JIT). JIT’s flexible and cost-effective solutions have regularly elevated the success graph of its niche customer base. Telecommunication and Digital infrastructure has been identified as two of the key areas that would define the future of Sri Lanka and JIT is committed to support and partner the Government’s digitalization vision whilst harnessing it’s success and
expertise towards the ICT imprint of the country.

In its two decade journey, JIT has rapidly evolved from a four-member team to an employee group of over 200. From selling Compaq computers to being a full-fledged system integrator, JIT has emerged as a pioneer in the Sri Lankan technology-scape providing Information and Communications Technology (ICT) solutions ranging from systems integration to Geographical Information Systems (GIS). “With over two decades of project experience of successfully delivering complex IT projects, we have a team of well experienced, multi-skilled certified professionals specializing in solution design and systems integration,”
says Jit Warnakulasuriya, Founder & Chairman of JIT.

Delivering solutions of national importance, JIT was instrumental in deploying the electronic fund settlement system called Real Time Gross Settlement System (RTGS) bringing Sri Lanka up to international banking standards. JIT’s team also assisted the Peoples Bank, a state-owned bank in Sri Lanka in implementing a robust ATM switch with ATOS Worldline. The offering helped them to overcome the challenge of connecting two different core banking solutions. This solution crafted a product that could communicate via ATMs and then later powered it to new core-banking and digital platforms. The firm as the local technology partner also supported the deployment of the Central switch system with its principal FIS to connect all the ATMs of the country which is known as the common card and payments switch. This is a landmark project for the financial landscape as the only common switch for the country and has successfully gone live giving birth to Sri Lanka’s largest common ATM network. connecting over 2500 ATMs.

Furthermore, JIT with its expertise in Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technology provides solutions and expertconsultancy that helps clients to analyse data from a geographical perspective to enhance the effectiveness of their planning as well as make more informed and accurate decisions. GIS drives the Public & Government sectors digitalization process asfoundation platform. JIT with its tie up with Esri (acronym for Environmental Systems Research Institute – USA) who is considered the global technology leader in GIS as well as in Sri Lanka, remains the only fully equipped & supported GIS technology provider in Sri Lanka. All of Sri Lanka’s authoritative Mapping up to date is done on the platform
provided by JIT.

Being a visionary, Warnakulasuriya understands the importance of partnering with other market giants in the same space. ‘Our success has always been our strength in relationships with our stakeholders be it customers or principals, on which we place great emphasis remarked Warnakulasuriya. To this end, the company has collaborated with some of the prominent market leaders such
as Gemalto, IBM, FIS, Silverlake, DELLEMC, Netcracker and CGI to name a few. Moreover, JIT’s associations have helped them address the core pain points of customers and then usher appropriate remedies for the same.In the years ahead, JIT envisions implementing new solutions and techniques for digitally transforming the functionality of Govt & Public sector.

JIT surpassed their mammoth Two Decade landmark in the ICT landscape of Sri Lanka, as a leading ICT Systems and Solutions Integrator to the country. This two decade success with their longstanding customers, strategic principals and committed employees have been the catalyst for JIT’s success and brining many landmark projects with cutting edge technology to the country and making Sri Lanka’s mark in the global ICT map.

At the recently concluded Sri Lanka Best Employer Awards, Just In Time Group (JIT) walked away with the award for the ‘Best HR Event of the Year’ for its inaugural long service awards, that honoured and recognized their long standing employees by celebrating their dedication, commitment and loyalty.

Commencing operations with modest beginnings 20 years ago, Just In Time Group is proud of its position as a leading ICT systems and solutions provider in Sri Lanka to a niche market and has today grown to unparalleled success cementing its position.

It is indeed apt that upon reaching a 20-year milestone that the employees who contributed to this success be felicitated for their service and commitment. The inaugural Just In Time Group Long Service Awards, was held to honour and appreciate their longstanding employees for their continued dedication, commitment and loyalty towards making Just In Time Group the success that it is today. The Long Service Awards was launched to recognize staff who has served the company for over five years and upto 20 years. It is noteworthy to mention that over 70 percent of staff have completed five years or more at JIT.

JIT’s Legal and Human Resources Head Sherene Goonetileke said: “We are extremely pleased to be named as the winner of the Best HR Event of the Year Award’ for 2016. Throughout our journey, through the many ups and downs our staff have been resilient in the face of change – be it in the company or in the field of ICT and have adapted remarkably and been the backbone of our successes. We believe we can never suffice in our efforts to recognize our staff for their commitment to our organization and through these awards we wanted to validate their efforts and dedication.”

JIT was also a recipient of the ‘Sri Lanka Best Employer Awards for the second year in succession. This event was held recently at Taj Samudra,Colombo and the event was organised by the World HRD Congress. The award for JIT was for it’s human resource practices of creating innovation at the work place.Sri Lanka’s Best Employer Brand Awards features top organizations from Sri Lanka, who are exemplary in HR and who use marketing communications effectively for human resources development. Some of the key criterion that the organizations were assessed on were; translating and combining vision and  action with HR strategy andbuilding line to mesh HR Strategy with business and cultivating competencies for the future to enable building the organization to be future-ready.

JIT is a company that believes in consistent improvement in HR policy and inculcating values of a social employer with a complete holistic approach. Creating a continuous dynamic place of work that adapts to change to keep the approach current and progressive can be a daunting task in this current fast track world, which puts JIT above the rest.

The ‘no holds barred’ all or nothing attitude is a motto at JIT that is practiced daily.Empowering the people to reach their goals successfully and that of the organization is the key fundamental that JIT foresees as the cornerstone of the  company’s continuous growth and future business sustainability.

Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) company joined hands once again with Just In Time Group (JIT) a Sri Lankan owned ICT Systems Integration Company to initiate a Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activity in Deniyaya.

Affected children from Deniyaya received donations of school bags, each containing educational appliances necessary for their study needs, which would help them continue with their schooling. The CSR event was patronized by Prime Minister, Ranil Wickremesinghe, Minister of Law and Order and Southern Development, Sagala Ratnayaka, Huawei Sri Lanka CEO Shunli Wang and other dignitaries.

Deniyaya was reported to have encountered massive landslides and persistent rains, especially in the area of Morawaka Kanda, which had resulted in a number of deaths and displaced residents. School children were affected due to this epidemic.

In light of these events, requests from benefactors which included Huawei and JIT decided to come forward and assist flood affected students with their education. School children had their books and educational material destroyed as a result of these rains.

Previously, Huawei had also collaborated with JIT as strategic partners to work together in projects that were aimed towards supporting Sri Lanka’s ICT and digital economy. Many initiatives that Huawei had conducted in their quest to empower Sri Lanka’s futuristic goals through CSR, ‘Seeds for the Future’ was one such initiative which took place recently supporting and sponsoring young minds from state universities who were selected to travel to the Huawei Headquarters in Shenzhen, China on a study trip.

Commenting on the initiative that was taken by Huawei, Huawei Sri Lanka CEO Shunli Wang stated, “We were saddened to witness the recent epidemic which Sri Lanka had to endure recently. We identified with the areas that highlighted their need for assistance. Huawei decided to join hands with our strategic partners JIT and provide support to young school children who were especially affected by this issue.”

The purpose of this concept that was introduced to Sri Lanka was to enable opportunities for networking and the chance to connect with the rest of the world with the hope of exchanging latest technologies and best practices which would one day prove influential for Sri Lanka’s evolving digital landscape.

The CSIC was also endorsed by the Minister of Telecommunication and Digital Infrastructure Harin Fernando as an ideal learning centre which would benefit youth and students through excursions and get to witness the innovations of a global ICT company.

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Just in Time Group (JIT), a wholly Sri Lankan-owned flagship ICT systems Integration Company, steps into partnership with Huawei, a leading ICT provider across enterprise, consumer and carrier business segments in Sri Lanka as a strategic partner towards boosting the ICT landscape in Sri Lanka.

JIT and Huawei’s strategic and inaugural partnership is committed to enabling the future of building a Better connected Sri Lanka and confident about the Sri Lankan market. The synergy of this partnership will provide many benefits to the business landscape of Sri Lanka, and is committed to support and deliver towards the vision set by the Ministry of Telecommunication and Digital Infrastructure of a digitally-empowered nation. To activate this mission, the JIT partnership with Huawei will be focussed on implementing ICT solutions.

“At JIT we are all about technology, talent and transformation — believing in teamwork, tools, and smart thinking is what has made us successful and sustainable. JIT is proud of its progression and along with our strategic principals; we are committed to creating a brighter future for Sri Lanka – paving the way for further success. We are very optimistic and elated at this strategic union with a reputed technology giant like Huawei,” shared Chrishan Mendis, Chief Operating Officer of JIT.

Shunli Wang CEO of Huawei Sri Lanka said: “We are indeed delighted to partner with JIT offering the very best innovative solutions in making Sri Lanka a digitally empowered nation.”

Huawei is a leading global ICT solutions provider, focused on the carrier networks, enterprise, consumer, and cloud computing fields. Huawei products and solutions have been deployed in over 170 countries, serving more than one third of the world’s population. Huawei began its operations in Sri Lanka in 2005. At present, Huawei works with Sri Lankan operators to provide network service for about 70% population in Sri Lanka. Huawei’s smart phones are well welcomed by Sri Lanka consumers and is the fastest growing smartphone brand in the country.

JIT proudly stepped into their two decade metamorphosis in 2016, as their mammoth landmark in the e ICT landscape of Sri Lanka, as a leading ICT systems and solutions integrator to the country. This two decade success with our longstanding customers, strategic principals and committed employees have been the catalyst for JIT’s success and bringing many landmark projects with cutting edge technology to the country and making Sri Lanka’s mark in the global ICT map. JIT’s key strengths are focused on systems integration, software solutions, network and infrastructure, hardware, mobility, outsourcing IT professionals, professional services, information security services, maintenance and support services, etc.

JIT and Huawei collectively, fully support the vision of the Sri Lankan Government, for a holistic and empowered Digital Sri Lanka.

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It has been over 60 years since IBM introduced the first disk, the IBM 350, which was the size of a large wardrobe, with a capacity for storage of 3.75MB. Since then storage has evolved as more and more capacities were contained in smaller and smaller volumes.

In the present age, the typical IT infrastructure head would explore the possibility of keeping at least the data which is less frequently accessed and less critical hosted on the cloud. Computer storage prices have dropped below $ 0.10 per terabyte (TB), and it is simply not worthwhile to spend for the footprint, power and cooling for a category of data that can be stored elsewhere, and accessed on demand at a much less cost.

Evolution of network storage – The storage story in a nutshell
By the nineties, as enterprises needed to overcome the limitations presented with local storage, the concept of JBOD (Just-a-Bunch of Disks) caught on where a disk array connected via a SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) bus could be connected to a server, to provision storage. Some models offered a split bus option, where two servers could share the storage with RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) protection. They offered better usage of storage resources comparatively and were restricted by the speeds imposed by the SCSI connectivity.

With the decline of prices in computer hardware over time, Storage Area Networks which were considered as affordable only to the large scale enterprises, now became viable to be considered for the small and mid-range business enterprises. As such we saw Storage Area Network (SAN) based solutions being installed in State and private banks around 10 years back in Sri Lanka, with some of the then high performance Enterprise Class SAN systems being deployed at service providers like Sri Lanka Telecom.

Over the last decade or so we’ve seen SANs become a commodity. The product range varied, with high performance models with multiple controllers for large enterprises with heavy workloads, and dual controller models for mid-range and small businesses. The latter day models for small businesses have become so user-friendly that they are designed to be rolled out by the customers themselves with minimum involvement from the manufacturer or systems integrator.

Furthermore in the decade, the main pain points of the infrastructure chiefs have shifted from price of hardware to a different set. Decisions about the cost of the foot print in the data centre, cost of power and cooling, efficient use of compute have started complimenting the large scale integration that has been happening over the last so many decades in the field of semi-conductor electronics.

Storage today – The trends
Today we have network switches with very low latency, and deep buffers that can guarantee lossless networks, which is a “given” storage networking.

These trends in the networking field, complimented by the efficient use of compute power as availed via virtualisation, have today brought to the fore-front such technological trends as software defined storage aka, hyper-converged storages.

In one way the methodology of storage has taken the full circle as local storage is again being used. But by today the software stack which operates on these disks have advanced over the last decade and half, where each compute node works in unison with each other to present a common storage layer. The building blocks here are its local disks connected via a high performance network, ideally at a minimum of 10Gbps. Entry level solutions of this design have already been deployed in Union Assurance Life and Sci-com.

The major hurdle that the Sri Lankan businesses have at the moment is that their network infrastructure is slow to move forward from the 1Gb limit, which is an essential element to guarantee an acceptable level of performance, to match the speeds of the FC based, ( now traditional ) SAN, which operates at minimum of 8Gbps ( the newer models support 16Gbps ).

The future of storage and beyond
Yet, software defined storage is part of a small picture. The bigger picture is cloud based services.

The trend of cloud based collaboration services such as Google’s G-Suite, Amazon’s AWS or Microsoft Azure, where cloud based application and collaboration applications could be used for a much lesser fee than, if they were to be hosted in-house. This trend has already started in local Banks and other mid-range businesses. This would allow businesses to deploy only their core applications from within. So while SaaS (or Software as a Service) is already catching up in the local business sector, IaaS (or Infrastructure as a Service) would probably be the future, as prices decline so that businesses can host their core applications, use HPC (High Performance Computing) and carry out Big Data Analytics using the hosted Infrastructure. This would release the business from the responsibility of managing a complex storage infrastructure which requires a skilled staff, while meeting legal and compliance requirements too. More importantly, the business wouldn’t have to make the capital investment for storage and other compute resources.

These trends in combination (SDS, SaaS, IaaS), have made the designers of storage solutions to revisit their road maps. Flagship products by certain principles could very well be obsolete, and the models retired in the years to come, as advanced software which is hardware agnostic, coupled with diminishing hardware prices (for example solid state drives are fast becoming a commodity), offer more storage using simpler designs, with the software layer delivering what hardware did, a couple of years back.

(The writer is Solutions Architect, Just In Time Group.)

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Just In Time Group, a flagship ICT systems integration and services provider in Sri Lanka with 20 years in operation, has announced the appointment of Anthony Nair as its Group Head of Finance with effect from 1 June. This appointment is part of the Group’s restructuring, consolidation and growth strategy with its strategic direction of implementing the Government’s digitalisation vision and its journey to take the company into the future.

In a career spanning over 20 years, Nair has held strategic and operational management positions with leading local and multinational companies. Nair is doubly qualified with both finance and IT. Nair is a graduate in B.Sc. Accountancy and Financial Management from the University of Sri Jayewardenepura Sri Lanka. He is also an Associate member of ICSA, CIMA and ACCA-UK and a passed finalist of ICASL

Furthermore, he is armed with a Masters in Information Management from SLIIT-SL where he topped the batch by earning the ‘Best Performance’ award. Nair has also earned his MBA from the University of Wales – UK.

As the new Group Head of Finance, Nair will play a pivotal role in strategic financial management, risk management and re-engineering the internal process with the aid of information technology. Furthermore he will also be looking at growth avenues for the Group through acquisitions and consolidations.

Just In Time Group, a wholly Sri Lankan company has been a key partner and implementer of several cutting edge mission critical ICT projects in the country over the last two decades. With the dawn of 2016, Just In Time Group completed a two-decade mammoth journey in the ICT arena of Sri Lanka. This growth throughout the years is a vital milestone with their longstanding strategic partnerships with principals, customers and employees.

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Just In Time Technologies (JITT) was recently awarded with the latest ISO 9001:2015 certification. This certification is an identification of JITT’s commitment towards continual improvement in quality standards. JITT has been previously certified with ISO 9001:2008 and ISO 9001:2001 of which the current ISO 9001:2015 is an upgrade to their exiting quality standard. This was awarded and confirmed JITT from the International Certification Services under DNV GL accreditation.

A quality management system (QMS) is a set of policies, processes and procedures required for planning and execution in the core business area of an organisation. ISO 9001:2015 is the latest edition of ISO 9001 and ISO’s flagship QMS standard is the most recent standard with three years of revision work by experts from nearly 95 participating and observing countries to bring the standard up to date with modern needs.

The scope of the ISO 9001:2015 certificate for Just In Time Technologies goes by; the Supply, Installation, Integration, Support and maintenance of ICT Systems and Solutions.

ISO 9001:2015 offers a truly coherent framework towards consistent performance, reliable service and long-term continuous improvement. The International Standards Organization (ISO) Quality Management System (QMS) is the world’s most current and widespread management system standard, which is used globally, by over a million organisations. ISO is simply a set of strategic tools and guidelines to help businesses tackle some of the most challenging tasks of modern business. It ensures that business operations are as well-organised as possible, help to increase productivity and help businesses’ access new markets or opportunities. It will also reinforce the habit of management systems as a governance tool and assist in identifying business opportunities that contribute to bottom-line improvements.

“Our 20 year journey cements our commitment towards innovative and sustainable solutions to the customers. Having a quality management system certified by ISO standards undoubtedly gives greater confidence to our stakeholders to rely on our company for their IT solutions and services. ISO 9001:2015 similarly, supports the eco system of business needs through a holistic approach,” shared Just In Time Group Chief Operating Officer Chrishan Mendis.

This newly updated ISO 9001:2015 has evolved to remain relevant, and reflect the needs of modern day businesses. The standard is a powerful tool to make sure that businesses continually grow and remain organisationally resilient. The new standard will ensure; continuous improvement and quality management within an organisation, whilst integrating and aligning business strategies. It will also reinforce the habit of management systems as a governance tool and assist in identifying business opportunities that contribute to bottom-line improvements. The new structure will ensure ISO management systems standards and the ability to easily implement multiple, integrated management systems.

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