Mitra – Stitching solutions to improve daily life
Innovation is the salient buzz word for tech businesses, whose managements are always seeking out new ideas from start-ups, incubated projects or other unusual channels, listening for murmurs which may disrupt their industry.
In such a scenario, it’s not incredulous if Sri Lankans will use drones to count or even pluck coconuts. So says Dhammika Ganegama, Managing Director of Mitra Innovation, a software firm now half a decade old and builds technology for their clients based in Colombo, UK, US and Australia.
Mitra deals in 5-areas. “Healthcare, finance, retail, pension and elderly care are areas that we are strong,” Mr. Ganegama told the Business Times on the sidelines of the company’s launch in Colombo recently.
In a world of rapid technological progress, where every human being is anticipated to be connected to the internet within the next decade, and the global population is expected to reach 10 billion by 2050, the impulse to innovate has never been stronger. “By grouping together the competence of different partners and dissimilar assets with their global reach, and creating a uniform presence in capability, Mitra Innovation is adding value to everyone,” Mr. Ganegama added.
The company has over 20 clients including (among others) Philips, Pizza Hut Australia, Kantar World Panel (a WPP company), Ramsay Healthcare, Capital Alliance, Beyond Analysis and Travis Perkins, as well as a network of partners in place with companies such as WSO2, Chakray, Amazon Web Services, and Cap Gemini.
Explaining the sectors that Mitra is into, Mr. Ganegama said that in the healthcare sector the company has dealt with a product in pathology. “This product is used for early cancer cell detection and was acquired by Phillips. They’re doing a lot of work with it.”
Mitra has assisted Capital Alliance to integrate their existing systems while assisting a financial establishment to integrate their portfolio, Mr. Ganegama added.
The company is also working on healthcare products such as technology that monitors elderly people remotely and alerts their children if something goes wrong, like a fall or an increase in temperature.
“This product is called Kraydel which is a platform which has the ability to notify relatives and emergency services in emergency situations. This required a tool capable of alerting certain sets of people for each elderly individual – all of whom may have different preferences when it comes to receiving notifications,” Founder and CEO of Mitra, Ashok Suppiah said.
He added that Mitra won a contract from Travis Perkins, a British builders’Â merchant and home improvement retailer to integrate a large number of its existing internal systems. “That’s in our retail sector,” Mr. Ganegama added.
Mitra Innovation has ambitious plans for the second half of 2017 with regards to technology innovation, advanced R&D and launching proprietary integration and incubation products, such as APE2 and AI5. The company also plans to more than double its engineering team during the latter part of the year.