Information Technology Company Cited for Corporate Citizenship

By Burton Bollag

Hours after a 2004 tsunami devastated coastal communities in Sri Lanka, humanitarian organizations were scrambling to find computer software to help manage the relief effort. Sanjiva Weerawarana, founding director of the nonprofit Lanka Software Foundation, understood that computer technology could play a crucial role in directing aid to where it was needed most after a disaster of this scale.

In an Internet blog, Weerawarana recalled making an urgent call to the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) three days after the giant waves struck. "I was told that FEMA had no software that could help. ... They only had software that was used to cut checks to people after hurricanes."

So the software foundation led an intensive volunteer effort to create a system. "Virtusa was the leading contributor," Weerawarana wrote, referring to the U.S. information technology company, "with more than 75 of [its] engineering staff helping at some time or the other."

Within four weeks of the tsunami, the relief-management software was in use. Since then, it has been expanded and now includes components for managing aid and volunteers, tracking camps for people displaced from their homes, finding missing persons and providing situation reports.

It is an open-source system, meaning it is available free to everyone. It is named Sahana, meaning "relief" in Sinhalese, the most widely spoken language in Sri Lanka. The system has been used to manage relief operations in Pakistan, the Philippines, Indonesia and China.

Founded in 1996 and headquartered in Massachusetts, Virtusa Corporation specializes in providing custom software development for companies in the financial services, telecommunications, and media and information industries. The company, which went public in 2007, had $165 million in revenue during its last fiscal year.

According to the U.S. Embassy in Sri Lanka, the company also demonstrated "outstanding corporate citizenship" in its contributions to building up Sri Lanka's information-technology capacity. Virtusa has donated computers and training to local schools and to a charity providing Internet connections to rural villages. Virtusa collaborates with Sri Lankan universities, helping build up their technology programs and providing staff as visiting lecturers.

Virtusa has provided accelerated information-technology training to several dozen promising university graduates and hired most of them into professional careers. The company seeks to make a "sustainable contribution to the communities in which we operate," Kris Canekeratne, the company's Sri Lankan-born chief executive, said in a written statement.

Sri Lanka's information-technology sector is growing. But "because of the internal conflict of the last 30 years, it has fallen behind India," Marc Hebert, Virtusa's marketing chief, told America.gov.

The company's clients are mostly businesses in the United States, Europe and the Middle East. But the vast majority of its 3,500 employees work at two advanced technology centers in India and another in Sri Lanka.

Hebert said Virtusa continues to promote open-source software in Sri Lanka. Such programs are free to all users, and since neither programs nor any pieces of code are protected by copyright, individuals or groups can modify them to suit their own uses.

Hebert said encouraging the use of such free programs "actually complements our own business remarkably well." He said that like other software companies, Virtusa increasingly proposes solutions in which its clients adopt free software and pay Virtusa to enhance and support it.

Virtusa Corporation's readiness to help was cited by the U.S. Embassy in Sri Lanka when it nominated the company for the secretary of state's 2008 Award for Corporate Excellence. The company was one of 11 finalists for the award presented November 6 at the State Department.

Source: U.S. Department of State