Gandhinagar Manufacturing Unit – Case study over Conversation

Gandhinagar, India, the greenest capital city in Asia, is known as the Jurrasic Park of India, with the world’s second hatchery of dinosaurs’ eggs. It is also the host of the famous GIFT City,

a dream project of honourable Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi. Gandhinagar is also the hub of the Electronics Industry with a dedicated Electronics GIDC.

I visited our years-old champion customer in Gandhinagar. They are credited with developing world-class products in Industrial Electronics, Automation, Motor Controls and Power Quality. They have 250 plus users in the Gandhinagar Head Quarter and a hundred employees worldwide in sales and service.

It would be insightful to share my conversation with the Managing Director. I had a memorable 45 minutes reflection on why his enterprise depends on BLACKbox as a mission-critical device. And what value it has contributed to his enterprise.

I thank him for allowing me to share this conversation without disclosing his name, which is a brand in his field. In the interest of time, I am summarizing the conversation.

Here are the excerpts.

Question:

When you chose BLACKbox long back, what was that one thing that appealed to you?

Response:

It is indeed long back. We were just 40 users, and Synersoft had just launched the BLACKbox hardware product. I had to standardize my IT infrastructure to convince customers worldwide and protect the IPRs we generated. We evaluated many solutions. Most consultants advised us to invest in multiple hardware and software components like; file server, active directory server, firewall, mail distribution software, endpoint controls, automatic backup solution, and storage device. It involved the purchase of three multiple hardware with server operating systems, client access license, hardware firewall, NAS device, and DLP software. It was not enough. I had to engage a highly qualified IT person to coordinate with multiple vendors to integrate and maintain this infrastructure. Honestly, it sounded tedious, complex, and costly at that stage of my company. I did not know IT much, but my team recognized me as the most IT-savvy person. As in a small company, every small decision depended on me. I had no management bandwidth to deal with it. When I came across BLACKbox, I liked the concept. The SME flavour of BLACKbox appealed to me. The concept of single hardware and single software to create standard IT infrastructure instantly, ease of dealing with a single vendor, and call centre support leaned me in favour of BLACKbox.

Question:

40 to 350 users in eight years looks like a phenomenal scaleup. Now you have an IT team and hierarchy to delegate the decisions. You recently purchased the latest version of BLACKbox. How has BLACKbox coped with your growth and continued to be a preferred solution?

Response:

True. It happened by itself. As we grew, we needed more storage and more powerful hardware. Our requirements also expanded regarding Information Security Compliance, Mobile Device Controls, Business Continuity Plan, and Cybersecurity Challenges. You have a fantastic buyback policy to upgrade the device for more storage and users. What we procured was never wasted at the time of upgrading the hardware. As I know, we just paid the price difference between the old and new devices. We started with a single forty users box, upgraded to 100 users box within four years, and now we are using 350 users twin box with redundancy. I have continuously tracked your product upgrades. A new feature is added every three months, which has continued for the last eight years. I appreciate the agility by which BLACKbox is enriched with the new features to cover expanding requirements of its customers. At the moment, we successfully get through Information Security Audits by our customers and are confident about Data Leakage Prevention over USB, Emails, Internet, Tablets, and Mobile Devices. We use twin BLACKbox devices on breath-on-breath technology (high availability) with automatic fail-over and have a daily off-premise backup on BLACKbox data centre as our Business Continuity Plan. I must mention that at every stage of expansion in our requirements, we did not have to look around for solutions; BLACKbox had it.

Question:

I cannot expect any more heartening response. Your IT team is now a champion on how best to use BLACKbox. It feels great to have matched customers’ expectations. Do you know that we have received so many valuable inputs from your IT team on our product development roadmap and implemented it in BLACKbox?

Response:

I am glad if it has happened. I appreciate this practice to keep updating customers’ wishlists. At the same time, I don’t want to take away credit from your product team. Your solution to saving cost on a G-Suite subscription is an ACE solution. We have saved lacs over the years.

Vishal:

That’s so encouraging to learn. I am going to share this with my readers. What message would you like to give to them?

Response:

We entrepreneurs must remember that IT is not our business, and our business is not IT. We poke our nose to create IT infrastructure on our own with multiple hardware, software, and services. We must accept that brilliant IT talent will never be available to MSMEs. We waste our time if something readymade is available and try reinventing the wheel. BLACKbox is that thing which instantly sets the IT infrastructure right and protects data from loss, leakage, and theft. We started with small and now grown big; BLACKbox has always kept up with us.

Such insightful reflections derive a more understandable case study. I will continue to publish more “Case Study over Conversation”.

Best Regards,

Vishal Shah

Founder and CEO,
Synersoft Technologies Pvt Ltd