“Based on AWS platform, we are offering high reliable email system for customers”

Tarun Malaviya, Founder & CEO MITHI Software Technologies worked with the CDAC, where he was a part of scientific data visualisation. An engineering graduate from PICT, he created his company; the first product that we created was the LEAP MAIL, it was an Indian language word processor which went on to become a best seller. 

Mithi Software (an organisation with about 40 people) is providing collaboration solutions to help build smart businesses. Its products include SkyConnect (When everyone in your team depends on the email to keep things moving, an Always-on Email service is essential for running an efficient enterprise) – cloud based email collaboration solution, and its latest offering Vaultastic (Vaultastic helps your business with all eDiscovery, Compliance and Business Continuity needs) – a cloud email archiving solution, help in delivering on its mission of making technology more accessible, useful and affordable.

Technology Orchestration: 
“For a long time we have been an enterprise software company. Mithi Software has added various features like in-chat and video conferencing as a part of a solution. We are deploying our software in customer’s data centers. Our products are actually an alternative to products like Microsoft Exchange, Google Suite or Lotus Notes and those are really the big competition that we fight with in the market. Our software is built on the open source platform, and we started with the impression that if we can create a lower cost alternative in an open market for the customers then we will be able to gain a larger adoption. 

We had a very good success rate and very large companies are using our services like Aditya Birla, DRDO, Kotak, Mahindra, DMRC and so on. In simpler terms, it is an alternative to what Microsoft Exchange and IBM’s Lotus Notes have. So it’s a high performance, high security but much lower cost infrastructure. We also have smaller customers like NCL Manufacturers or small software companies like BPOs etc. 

One of the problems with the enterprise software was that we had to do the deployment of software in the customer environment. Typically what happened was that the larger companies had a much better environment and also a much more capable IT team. Whereas, the smaller companies usually didn’t have the IT team strength or the infrastructure. Hence, the experience of users varies in the two situations. That was the no.1 problem.

The second problem was that the deployments were pretty long. Because it’s a physical environment, the deployment took very long when we brought upgrades of the software. The customers would say that they are not ready and they would like to look at the upgrades a little later. This makes the whole process a little slow. 

We have customers from 5 users to 50,000 users and we can still give a uniform experience. Obviously the 50,000 user organisation can buy much more hardware than a 5 person organisation can. But both the customers get a similar experience. They are also going to get the same level of security, the same level of performance and same amount of scalability. We are using the same platform and the platform itself is a very well developed and a pretty matured platform.
 
LEAP Mail vs Gmail solution... 
If you look at our pricing solutions, we are priced at about 50% or 40% lesser than what bigger solutions are priced. That is the first thing; second thing is that we give a lot of flexibility in our system. There is not any standard package that we are offering; for 25 person organisation, our starting plan is at Rs.799 for a single user for a year. That works out to less than Rs 2 per day per user. So if you look at even today a person is gaining 1% productivity in a year and you take his salary to be Rs 10k, you are actually saving on returning many times the value. 

Business alignment with AWS...
While doing this email system we realised that email is becoming a very important system of record.  AWS has brought very high reliability in terms of storage. One of the things what we can offer is an archival solution, so all your emails are archived. Let’s say for example if you are a bank and you are required by law to keep the information of all the transactions for seven years, so you must maintain a record. One of the problems is that your data might get lost because of the failure of the system or it can be intentionally deleted. 

We have created an automated system solution where an email is getting automatically recorded and once it goes it into the archival, you cannot delete it. You can retrieve it and you can see it in the search.

Mithi Software’s customer base...
We have about 300 enterprise customers across verticals including the BPOs, IT companies, Manufacturing companies, Banks such as Kotak Bank. We have South Indian Bank, Karnataka Bank, Cosmos Bank, Mahanagar Bank etc. In fact we are also running the ‘108’ emergency service while running our email system. You can imagine if a bank and critical emergency systems are running on our email system, it has to be working all the time. This is the reason why we have to continuously innovate to ensure that it is safe, running and the data is not compromised and that the system is always delivering on time. This is what actually is driving us to do all the innovation.