MySQL Co-Founder David Axmark at OrangeHRM Sri Lanka

MySQL Co-Founder and a Director of OrangeHRM Inc., David Axmark visited the company’s R&D center in Colombo last month. OrangeHRM made sure the visit of this iconic figure was used to the benefit of IT students from two of the top Universities in Sri Lanka. Two guest speeches were organized at the University of Moratuwa and University of Colombo.

The topic Modern Open-Source Trends attracted many young IT Students from both universities.

This was an opportunity not to be missed. David spoke about how MySQL was begun in the late 70s along with Michael “Monty” Widenius and how it went on to be sold to Sun Micro Systems for a billion dollars.

David’s speech also addressed why he chose to invest in OrangeHRM.  According to him, “OrangeHRM is a unique application and the worlds most popular open source HRIS.  It has proven its success through the past few years with its innovative features and ease of use.”

David also encouraged students not to simply be constrained to learning programming languages but to think beyond them by learning the concepts of engineering which would allow them to keep their options open.  He said “Too much focus on languages such .NET or Java has led to high quality languages such as PHP being ignored. Development languages can come and go but a solid software foundation will help you to build on any new languages that will come in the future.”

Sujee Saparamadu, Co-founder & CEO of OrangeHRM spoke about how proud we should be as Sri Lankans to achieve the name brand recognition of OrangeHRM around the world.  Currently there are over a million users using the system globally.

Himath Dissanayake, CTO of OrangeHRM and graduate of the University of Moratuwa and Nilufer Nilar, Project Manager at OrangeHRM and graduate from the University of Colombo shared their experiences at OrangeHRM and guided students to learn IT in the proper way, speaking on the topic “The Road Ahead.”