Exclusive Interview with Vishal Shah, Co-Founder, and CEO, Synersoft Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

Multicloud applications are in vogue for the multiple security features they come with. But for medium-scale companies, buying into diversified cloud applications turn out to be a difficult and cumbersome task. Keeping track of multiple consoles, and several APIs and getting accustomed to a variety of procedures all while saving data is a major challenge for MSMEs. Synersoft, a cloud management platform, in order to address multi-cloud management complexities, has developed simple and cost-effective alternatives particularly for preventing data theft and loss. Analytics Insight has engaged in an exclusive interview with Vishal Shah, Co-Founder, and CEO, of Synersoft Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

1. Kindly brief us about the company, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

Synersoft Technologies Private Limited makes technologies under the brand name BLACKbox. Under the Make in India initiative, it was named as indigenous technology developed by an Indian company for Indian Business Enterprises. Synersoft is conferred with prestigious awards and recognitions by the Government as well as Private Institutions.  BLACKbox helps business enterprises to achieve business continuity and avoid competitive vulnerability by preventing loss, leakage, and theft of data. Synersoft Technologies Private Limited is a portfolio company of CIIE at the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad. It was founded by Vishal Shah, a serial entrepreneur and technocrat in the year 2008. Synersoft Technologies Private Limited is the owner of the technology and brand known as BLACKbox. It is a disruptive solution specifically designed for Indian Small and Medium Enterprises to prevent data loss, leakage, and theft. BLACKbox is adopted by thousands of Indian SME users to achieve business continuity and avoid competitive exploitation. Synersoft has a presence in most industrial pockets of India where MSMEs are heavily concentrated.

BLACKbox is a popular brand among industries and businesses in India as a cost-effective, simple, and fit-to-purpose AI-enabled product. In 2008, the founders of Synersoft started up with a vision that Indian enterprises will require formidable infrastructure to prevent data theft. This is how the brand BLACKbox was conceptualized to help Indian enterprises to standardize their IT setup to achieve data security. BLACKbox serves as a data center protecting against accidental or intentional data deletion, ransomware recovery solutions, and an off-premise disaster response facility. It also serves as an effective tool to prevent data theft through USB ports, e-mail attachments, and Internet cloud storage drives. With thousands of installations, BLACKbox proves to be the best available indigenously developed solution. BLACKbox is also known as 'IT in a box' which serves as a single hardware/software system but with multipurpose hardware/software solutions.

2. With what mission and objectives, the company was set up? In short, tell us about your journey since the inception of the company.

Our company is committed to MSMEs in their pursuit of achieving the prevention of data loss, leakage, and theft. We help thousands of enterprise users to maintain business continuity by preventing data loss from accidental deletion, intentional deletion, ransomware attacks, and disasters. We help thousands of enterprise users to avoid competitive exploitation due to data leakage or theft over USB, through emails, by blind carbon copy, and over the Internet. We help our MSME customers to focus on their core business and let IT matters to us.

3. Brief us about the proactive Founder/CEO of the company and his/her contributions to the company and the industry.

Vishal Shah is known as a seasoned technology stalwart, an inventor of specific patented technologies, a writer, a serial entrepreneur, an investor, and importantly, a 'go-to guy' for MSMEs. Under his leadership, Synersoft achieved many milestones, including winning a gold medal at Indian Innovates Growth Program organized by FICCI, TechXchange award in 2019 by Innovation Driven Scale Up Cohort, UK, organized by FICCI, recognized as the 10 most recommended Infrastructure Managed Service Providers 2019 by CIO Inside, and many more.

4. Kindly share your point of view on the current scenario of Big Data Analytics and its future.

Data captured from IoT devices, browsers, GPS, industrial equipment, connected automobiles, wearables, etc., needs to be converted to information. Big Data Analytics converts data into insightful information to help decision-making. Currently, due to the lack of infrastructure and DA professionals, the available data is not put to analysis and transformed into actionable information. Data is the new gold and analytics is the future of preventive maintenance, proactive decision making, and artificial intelligence.

5. Kindly mention some of the major challenges the company has faced till now.

Our major challenge has been to convince the market that an Indian product can perform on par with American and European products in the field of data protection and information security.

6. What is your biggest USP that differentiates the company from competitors?

We design, develop, sell, implement and support products that are simple, effective, affordable, dependable, and scalable. That is what differentiates us from our competitors. BLACKbox is the only brand that has incorporated design thinking with a data owner's perspective unlike other brands with a data manager's perspective. BLACKbox is a cutting-edge solution that runs multiple functions in single hardware unlike other brands requiring multiple hardware to run multiple functions of data loss, leakage, and theft prevention solutions. BLACKbox runs many proprietary features like Autocratic Centralization, Vault-Workspace, Happy Hours, Screen-Captures, On-the-Fly-VPN, Email Shadowing, BCC-Intercept, and USB Usage Reporting which are missing in other brands and covers all possible devices like laptops, desktops, mobile, tablet while there are specific brands for the specific type of devices.

7. How is IoT/Big Data/AI/Robotics evolving today in the industry as a whole? What are the most important trends that you see emerging across the globe?

IoT / Big Data / AI / Robotics are the pillars of smart manufacturing and industry 4.0. With sensors, connecting devices and the big data world of analytics has seen a paradigm shift on how the data can be converted into insight information and actionable decisions. Big Data will be the most crucial component in the future with a view to artificial intelligence and machine learning.

8. Please brief us about the products/services/solutions you provide to your customers and how they get value out of it.

BLACKbox, as the name suggests, keeps logs of every important digital activity. It provides data centralization by minimizing data dispersion. It preserves data against loss and prevents data theft. This technology is a self-service tool and does not require extensive technical capabilities. It is always at the rescue of the enterprise in event of accidental or intentional deletion of data, ransomware attack, and disaster to maintain business continuity. It is also an AI-enabled security guard for the enterprise to detect, nullify, and report any attempts of data theft through USB, Email Attachment, or Internet through a laptop, desktop, mobile, or tablet device. We have recently launched BLACKbox AAA (Access Applications Anywhere) which is a cost-effective and secured application virtualization software to help enterprises allow access to the ERP applications remotely.