Kerala-based boardroom video conferencing (VC) provider Techgentsia Software Technologies is a homegrown, made-in-India company and its solutions have a play in government agencies, including courts and NIC. Its video conferencing solution, VConsol, won the Innovation Challenge competition that was held last year by MeitY, under the Digital India program. In an interview to CRN India Joy Sebastian, CEO, Techgentsia Software Technologies shares the company’s business roadmap
How is Techgentsia helping customers to adopt digital and remote collaboration?
Techgentsia was started in 2009 and since we are focusing on research and development in internet communication and collaboration – this is our domain. Currently, we have around 100 R&D engineers working in this domain trying to push the limits and drive innovation. We are helping people go digital and collaborate better. We work with three types of customers: normal individuals who want to connect, the corporate sector and the government sector. If we come to the first segment, the individuals you know, that we help individuals to meet for personal reasons, and for business reasons, whatever, they can talk, they can meet each other and collaborate. Our corporate customers use Vconsol – for their corporate and board meetings, Vconsol is a fully integrated, enterprise grade video conferencing solution for Android, iOS, Mac, Windows & Linux platforms that we made in India. With AES 128 GCM encryption, it’s secure, reliable and highly practical.
This is used for their corporate and board meetings. Additionally, customers can integrate Vconsol into their existing services. For example, if your company is a real estate company, and you have to conduct a customer survey for customer support services, you can integrate Vconsol into your website, or your app whereby with a click of a button your customer can do a video conference with the client support personnel.
In the government sector, Vconsol is able to help them keep their data within the country. This way safety, security and privacy are addressed. We believe Vconsol is better than normal video conferencing solutions available in India. Almost all government services are using Vconsol. Government of India, under Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, is already using Vconsol – it is hosted on the NIC cloud and is now rebranded as BharatVC.
We are also helping PSUs move into digital and collaborate using BharatVC. Its applicability is in many areas like education, and telemedicine. We created the first role-based virtual court using the Vconsol engine for Kerala High Court. We are also helping municipalities and panchayats to conduct their meetings in a more efficient manner.
Can you tell about your company’s commitment to India amidst the digital shift?
India is a country where a lot of transformation is happening, especially in the digital field, with increased internet use and collaboration. Recently, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India announced a challenge to find a 100% Made in India video conferencing company – to ensure data security is accounted for, we decide to participate in it and we won the Innovation Challenge award. Through our solution, we are helping companies embark on their digital journeys faster.
Being an Indian player how are you expanding your business?
Every business is a success only when a large number of people are using it. Currently, our Vconsol is available in the public domain for people to download and use it for their personal business requirements. We want the SaaS model of Vconsol to become popular in India so that Indians can appreciate a 100 % made in India product. It is much better a product when compared to other video conferencing solutions available in the market with more functionalities, features and data security.
Apart from NIC, we are presenting Vconsol to other governments – in different states across India taking the use case in Kerala we have. We are also talking to governments across the world since our solution offers all the necessary functionalities they look for like security, stability and scalability, to help them serve a large base of users.
How do you ensure scalability given high demand? How Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, OCI is helping the solution to meet the demand.
The pandemic surely accelerated the adoption of video conferencing solutions. People were more concerned about how they would stay in touch, businesses were unsure as to how they would be able to conduct business. So, naturally, video conferencing, corporate video conferencing started to be used with a big bang. There are many VC solution options available in the market, but when Vconsol was introduced into the market as a SaaS model, a lot corporates and individuals got interested because we are a 100% made-in-India version. Vconsol provides the security and privacy of all our data, business data remains in India under Indian jurisdiction. As a result, demand went up. It was important for us to partner with a technology partner who could support unplanned growth, yet help us improve our solution.
Vconsol has scaling script available on cloud and the system architecture is designed in such a way that horizontal or vertical scaling is possible, in any elastic cloud. So, when demand skyrocketed, it was possible for us to have scripts that could manage our demand.
Vconsol is a software based MCU (multi control unit). It uses software MCU to run video conferencing solutions. By design, software based MCUs are going to be very server intensive. So, we need to have the right technology platform, IT set up and support that can handle intensive processing.
We believe Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) had the best offering for us – they displayed more power in computing our intensive video processing environment. We have very high bandwidths for our real time multi party conferencing, and with OCI we were able to experience exceptional compute performance, fast networking, enterprise-grade security capabilities and compliance standards, in addition to the platform’s support for cloud-native technologies. Additionally, we have been able to reduce our infrastructure cost by 40 %. Oracle was our most ideal partner for the Vconsol architecture.
How is Techgentsia planning to position the Vconsol as a leader in the domain?
Vconsol is a pure software-based conferencing platform. Currently, the boardroom video conferencing solutions market is dominated by a few players and the costs are high. Finally, with everyone moving to metaverse, we look forward to incorporating Vconsol into the metaverse. We have teams already working on this. We believe VR and AR will co-exist with people in this world.
