Cisco today deepened its commitment to accelerate Sri Lanka’s digital transformation and help build business resiliency for its businesses with the launch of its Resilient Distributed Enterprise product portfolio. In addition, Cisco will also be doubling down on its partner engagements and expanding its Networking Academy program to empower Sri Lanka’s businesses in the next normal and help achieve the government’s vision of a digitally inclusive and sustainable nation.
Even before the pandemic, Sri Lanka was on its way to becoming a knowledge economy, with one of the highest mobile penetrations at 149% of the population, and a thriving ICT-BPM sector expected to reach USD 5 billion by 2022. Today, Sri Lanka is at an inflection point as the pandemic shapes a new world, governed by new rules and new behaviors, with consumers becoming more committed to their health, more isolated and independent, and displaying a growing preference for low-touch, contactless alternatives. For instance, Sri Lanka’s largest e-commerce platform has seen a growth of 2.5X in orders year-over-year in 2020.
In this evolving and dynamic ecosystem, the ability of organizations to pivot and adapt to changing market conditions will determine their success. Recognizing this, small and large enterprises in Sri Lanka across its major industries like e-commerce, tourism, IT/ITeS, and manufacturing, are reimagining their business models to cater to newly dispersed and digital consumers. They are virtualizing their processes, adopting hybrid work models, and automating their supply chains to make their businesses more agile and resilient to future crises, all while safeguarding their information, assets, and employees’ privacy, because the threat landscape has not only widened but become more complex.
To make these transitions easy and seamless, and prime them for success in the new normal, Cisco is enabling the transformation of Sri Lanka’s businesses into “Resilient Distributed Enterprises” (RDE), bringing the capabilities of a resilient technology infrastructure that permits them to work from anywhere, collaborate from any device, manage from anywhere (including automation, data analytics, assurance, and policy) and maximize experience and productivity by serving distributed workers, applications and cloud services, with security front and center.
As part of its new RDE portfolio, Cisco is introducing SecureX, an easy-to-use, cloud-native platform that unifies visibility across companies’ security portfolio, including detection of unknown threats and policy violations through security analytics for more informed actions. Furthermore, Cisco is enabling access to Intersight Workload Optimizer, an AI-powered, software-as-a-service platform that offers an intelligent level of management and allows organizations to simplify and automate IT operations. Through Intersight, firms can gain visibility to their full stack – from infrastructure to apps – on-premise and in the cloud, while optimizing costs, performance, and compliance in real-time.
This is the latest endeavor in Cisco’s ongoing initiatives to fast-track Sri Lanka’s digital journey. In addition to fostering RDE capabilities for its businesses, Cisco is continuing to help build a digitally proficient workforce in Sri Lanka through its Networking Academy. This program has trained almost 33,500 students since its inception and is one of the fastest-growing countries under the Cisco Networking Program in the APJ region in 2020. Cisco aims to increase this to 50,000 students by the end of 2021.
To deliver the benefits of its resilient technology architecture to many more businesses in Sri Lanka, Cisco is also focusing on expanding its partner ecosystem across the country.
Speaking about these new developments, Sudhir Nayar, Managing Director, Cisco SAARC, said, “In recent years, Sri Lanka has seen tremendous adoption in connected digital services, accompanied by the rising penetration of mobile broadband and improving internet connectivity, indicating its imminent transition into a digital economy. The pandemic has significantly accelerated this transformation, and technology is becoming core to everything, which I believe spells incredible opportunity for its workforces, businesses, and economy. To help Sri Lanka capitalize on this opportunity, we are proud to enable organizations in the country to leverage Cisco’s new “Resilient Distributed Enterprise” portfolio.”
“This latest offering has been designed with the needs of the dynamic and nimble enterprise of the future in mind, augmented by Cisco’s vast experience and expertise in cloud infrastructure, automation, and security. Through this initiative, which is bolstered by our continued commitment to developing skilled talent in the country, along with an extensive partner ecosystem to ensure maximum reach, Cisco aims to empower Sri Lanka’s businesses to win in the new world,” he concluded.
This commitment is aligned with Cisco’s goal of positively impacting 1 billion people globally and seeks to arm the nation’s businesses with the right tools and technologies and highly-skilled technology professionals to support Sri Lanka’s vision of becoming a leading digital economy