CAKE LABS opens new Operations Centre to cater expanding customer base

Mani Kulasooriya, CEO  of CAKE addressing the staff at the opening ceremony of the new CAKE LABS Operations Centre

Silicon Valley based tech company CAKE LABS recently unveiled their new Operations Centre, a state of the art facility in the Iceland Business Centre in Colombo 03. 

The facility that has been designed using latest industry trends such as open floor plans and hot-houses to aid communication, as well as sleeping rooms and games areas to facilitate relaxation, signifies the emphasis the company places on the key role operations plays in customer adoption of the CAKE restaurant technology platform. 

The move comes in conjunction with the record growth in the customer base of the company this year. Commenting on the growth, CEO Mani Kulasooriya said, “This has been a huge growth year for CAKE. The total value of transactions processed through our system this year alone will exceed all of our previous years combined. Furthermore, if the current growth rate continues, we will double our customer base in 2016. The expanding of our operations is a direct result of this success, as they are the key to increasing our market share.”

According to Kulasooriya, maintaining quality of service while scaling has been the key to expanding the customer base, and the operations division has played an enormous role in this. 
“Operations has been a cornerstone to securing traction in the market,” said Shanil Fernando, CAKE LABS SVP Engineering and MD, Sri Lanka. “You can certainly capture a market with a great product like ours, but you can’t retain your customers unless the product is stable. The POS for a restaurant operator is a mission critical system to run their restaurant. If the operators are encountering errors, then they will switch. That is where our proactive support team comes in.”

The CAKE LABS operations team distinguishes itself from its peers through its proactive approach. They studied how Tesla monitors their cars remotely and how Boeing proactively monitors live jet engines, and built a unique piece of technology where the team can identify potential errors in the field before they even take place. The team then performs fixes on the system before crashes occur, avoiding potential system-down time. 

Furthermore, CAKE LABS has employed several engineering initiatives to maintain stability. One such initiative was the new payment gateway, as nothing is more damaging to an operator’s business than being unable to process payments. The new gateway employs redundant servers in multiple cities on the East Coast and West Coast of the United States, as well as multiple third party payment processors, so that it can keep processing payments even when infrastructure may be down in a given geography or when third party processors are down. 

With these factors combined, CAKE LABS seems poised for exponential expansion in the coming months, both in terms of its number of operators, and the capabilities of the team. 
CAKE LABS (Pvt) Ltd is the Sri Lankan-based engineering and operations engine behind the integrated restaurant technology platform CAKE. CAKE Corporation, based in Silicon Valley (Redwood City, CA, USA), is a part of the fortune 500 company Sysco.