Sri Lankan Telco Operator Lanka Bell Transforms IT and Customer Experience with IBM

Higher efficiency infrastructure speeds go-to-market without significant capital investments

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Mar 28, 2013, 04:30 ET

COLOMBO, Sri Lanka, March 28, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Lanka Bell, a leading telecommunication service provider, has adopted IBM SmartCloud to transform its existing infrastructure to drive higher efficiency, manage costs and increase speed-to-market. The private cloud environment will not only help Lanka Bell improve customer experience but also equip the company to offer cloud based infrastructure and storage services to its clients.

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Established in 1997, Lanka Bell currently has a subscriber base of over 1 million users in the country and provides state-of-the-art voice and data solutions to both residential and business clientele. With rapid subscriber and telecom services usage growth, telecom carriers are increasingly shifting their focus from the traditional technology and networks towards enhancing customer services and business performance. To that end, Lanka Bell was looking for a cloud based IT infrastructure to gain scalability, enable business growth and ensure faster service delivery. The telecom company wanted to use the cloud solution to support its internal IT requirements as well as to offer cloud-based services.

Lanka Bell has adopted the IBM SmartCloud to increase business agility, optimize virtualization and reduce IT cost and complexity. The solution enables Lanka Bell to focus increasingly on their core business, enhance utilization of resources, and reduce operating costs. IBM will also help Lanka Bell upgrade its datacenter and disaster recovery environment to make it energy efficient and ensure uninterrupted service availability for clients.

"This collaboration not only drives scalability but ensures that our customers enjoy a higher level of reliability and comfort knowing that their data is secure in a private cloud environment," said Prasad Samarasinghe – Managing Director, Lanka Bell. "With IBM, the cloud computing infrastructure can be provisioned in a matter of minutes as compared to weeks or months on a traditional infrastructure setup. This has not only helped us deploy new features faster but also scale up the infrastructure rapidly -- enabling faster time to market. Moreover, we are now able to focus on growing the business without having to worry about the associated IT capital investments."

"As more and more businesses aim to position themselves ahead of the competition through transformative IT solutions, we are seeing an increased demand for cloud computing," said Chrishan M Fernando, Country General Manager, IBM Sri Lanka. "This win is a further testimony to IBM's telecom market leadership, wherein we helped Lanka Bell establish a robust infrastructure to achieve operational efficiencies, faster response time and quicker go-to-market with their offerings, thus enhancing customer experience."

With more than 50 years of leadership in Sri Lanka, IBM has a strong presence in the country and has been working with organizations to provide advanced technologies like big data and analytics to help them grow and succeed.

About IBM in Sri Lanka:
http://www.ibm.com/lk/en/

About Lanka Bell:
For more information on Lanka Bell Private Ltd., please visit http://www.lankabell.com/

SOURCE IBM