Having navigated a severe economic crisis, the ICT industry is among Sri Lanka’s fastest-growing export earners. The government has set its sights further still, aiming to move beyond the traditional pillars of tea, garments, and labour and position Sri Lanka as a technology export hub in its own right.
We have evolved every three to four years, built our own brand, set up our own manufacturing, and we are now exporting to markets like Zimbabwe. None of that happens without resilience, the right people, and a willingness to change before change is forced upon you.
Only a handful of IT companies in Sri Lanka have survived so long in this industry. What does EWIS have in its DNA that helped it survive and thrive?
Three things: resilience, adaptability, and the belief that nothing is permanent. IBM taught us to never stand still, and my mentors and my upbringing reinforced that.
We also invest heavily in training our people to be adaptable, including getting them ready for AI now. In Sri Lanka especially, where policies and rules shift constantly, you have to get comfortable with uncertainty. That is not a disadvantage. It is actually good training for business.
EWIS has seen every wave of technology, including the internet, mobile, cloud, and now AI. Why is AI different this time?
I would add the millennium bug to that list, because we were there for that too. With the internet, Sri Lanka was held back by connectivity. Dial-up, the lack of fibre, and so on slowed our progress.
AI removes those barriers entirely. It fast-tracks access to information and compresses decision-making in a way nothing else has. My father’s generation had to write to companies in Germany and wait months for a catalogue just to set up a factory. The internet changed that. Now AI means we can think and work like Silicon Valley. People worried computers would replace jobs in the 1990s. They did not. AI will do the same: it will enhance productivity, accuracy, and continuity, not replace human judgement.
Sri Lanka has no shortage of companies using AI, but EWIS is now building AI platforms. What does Aegis offer beyond off-the-shelf global solutions?
Aegis is built around one promise: saving time. And I say that because most people, when they hear about a new solution, ask how much it costs. Very few ask how long it will take.
Time is where the real value is. A CEO who can get something done in three months instead of two years will pay more for that, and rightly so, because they earn back the difference faster. Aegis takes legacy systems that were never designed for cloud connectivity and modernises them rapidly. What takes two weeks can be done in seven minutes.
It also scans source code and identifies vulnerabilities, with full documentation on how to fix them. And we have developed something called a digital twin — a patented simulation capability that shows clients precisely how their modernised system will perform across databases and workflows before anything goes live. We already have between 8–12 customers in Sri Lanka, but our target is global.
Cybersecurity and AI are increasingly inseparable, where one creates vulnerabilities the other has to defend. How is EWIS thinking about that relationship, both in Aegis and in what you broadly offer clients?
Most legacy systems were built before the internet existed, so security was never designed into them. They were built as standalones, centralised systems. Then organisations were pushed to decentralise and connect to networks and the cloud, without those systems ever being built for that. Suddenly there were gates that anyone could walk through. Attackers are now using AI to find and exploit those gaps faster than ever.
Aegis addresses this directly, and in one proof-of-concept we identified 140 vulnerabilities in a client’s system. This is not about blame. It is simply that the threat environment has moved faster than the systems people depend on.
If Aegis succeeds the way you envision, what does that mean not just for EWIS, but for Sri Lanka’s position in the regional tech landscape?
Aegis was never built just for Sri Lanka. It was built for the world.
We are already in conversation with an African bank, we have presented in the US, and we are heading to Singapore for GITEX AI ASIA. European companies have approached us about acquisition.
Sri Lanka has spent over a century exporting tea, coconuts, garments, and labour, but technology IP is a fundamentally different kind of export. We had a glimpse of what was possible when Tony Weerasinghe sold his product to the London Stock Exchange, but we never built on that moment. Aegis is that kind of opportunity again.
We cannot compete with India on volume, but we have something India cannot easily replicate at our scale: quality, and a young, hungry team with an average age of 27. That is exactly what we are counting on.