Necessity being the mother of invention, the Covid-19 crisis has dramatically accelerated corporate digital transformation. As companies hurry to develop new digital capabilities to build resilience and retool for the post-pandemic world, keeping up with fast moving technology trends is critical. A human-centered approach to DAM configuration and deployment will make a huge difference in user adoption and, subsequently, business impact. The human-centered approach will help uncover the questions that you need to ask yourself to maximize the chances for your new DAM to become not just storage space but also an intuitive data management solution that people need in daily their working day. Another trend that is already gaining significance is the migration of enterprise systems from on-premise and co-location facilities. Public cloud-based implementations are now well understood, and many organizations are fine-tuning their implementations.
As a strong believer of a solution-based approach in life, Arnab Mitra, CEO, DigiBoxx, was looking for a quick-fix and permanent solution at the same time for every problem, and which quite often translates to a technology-based solution. Arnab started working with some exciting individuals and organizations on machine learning in identifying patterns around COVID19 cases, related to user behaviours and possible predictive analytics that could potentially help various government organizations. However, the pandemic’s biggest bane was the non-availability of critical files all across, and that’s exactly where Digiboxx was born. “A tech solution whose need was felt the most. Digiboxx is a testimony of our commitment to make Indians go paperless; so that in the future if we are out, fighting a bigger menace, our critical & necessary files and documents are made available to us whenever we need it and at a cost, we can afford in our own terms”, adds Arnab.
How it all started
While working for one of the group companies, Arnab and his team had to go through the tedious process of digging up an old data that was lost in the outdated data server, he realized there needs to be a simpler solution for this. Having a cloud service or private server set-up that can be used for data dump as data retrieval can turn into a nightmare, especially if we don’t know where they were kept and what file name they have been stored. “While we have enough storage options from the tech giants for business as well as individual users, but there’s a distinct lack of smart storage. There is no Digital Assets Management service in India in a sense that can help you manage your data and make the data work for you when you need it and more importantly, the way you need it. That’s where the whole concept of DigiBoxx came in.”, says Arnab.
DigiBoxx is a Digital Assets Management (DAM) platform that is completely new to the Indian Market. Before designing it, Arnab did a study across 20 cities in the country and realized that Indians from certain social strata don’t even care about storing their data. He wanted to start there and make them aware that storing your files in a platform that follows the law of the land is a must in the current geopolitical situation. Realizing almost 50% of the digital adopters are never going to speak English and various pockets where regional language prevails, DigiBoxx was created to have 8 languages that can be used to access their services.
There are many complex actions that all public cloud companies have set up because they did the research in their country. In order to tackle those issues, Arnab and his team customized DigiBoxx to cater to the needs of Indian and made it user friendly. “Another thing that is unique to us is our pricing structure. We want people to feel that Indians can own a lot in very little. Our pricing point is a strategic call where we provide 100GB of storage at Rs.1 per day”, points out Arnab. An engineering grad who loved everything digital, Arnab has never considered himself a leader. He says, “My lessons have been extremely grounded throughout my life. My parents, my elder sister, and more importantly, my teachers have instilled a sense of rigour in me that taught me that we need to work hard to make good things happen. This is something I firmly believe in and exercise till date”.
Making India Digitally Competent
Having been in the digital business for over 15 years, Arnab found it surprising that despite having 70 million digital users, only a few petabytes of data have been created over time. “We as Indians are late adopters to tech, we are still in the ‘catching up’ phase. With DigiBoxx, we wanted to change that. We believe that there is a huge potential to understand what it means to be Indian tech adopters. When we use global platforms, 80% of the time, we don’t understand those products and services. We perform only basic rudimentary actions. We wanted to simplify that and build something that was much more Indian. We wanted to provide a simple storage solution that can bring people together from all walks of life, regardless of their professional or personal needs”, opines Arnab.
With a small team that has people from some great organizations like Oracle, IBM, and Alibaba, DigiBoxx is a close knit group, that is running like a pack of wolves knowing what they need to achieve. Oversubscribed by 15 times than what they predicted for 3 months, within 2 days from their launch, DigiBoxx is all set to hit 1 million paid users in the next 6 months. “As for the long-term goals, we plan to hire 5,000 engineers to cater to the 10 million users we are looking to have as our users in the next three years”, concludes Arnab