How ProMobi Technologies’ range of products is building software for SMBs

Harishanker Kannan and Arnab Chakraborty, the Co-Founders of ProMobi Technologies Pvt. Ltd met as colleagues in a company they worked for, previously. With their extensive experience of building SaaS products, particularly in the kiosk software domain, they went on to build Scalefusion (then known as MobiLock Pro) - a SaaS product that helped businesses to monitor and manage their company-owned mobile devices. In 2014, the kiosks were rapidly gaining traction across industries- as self check-in devices at airports and hotels, as devices displaying audio-visual ads in waiting areas, or wayfinders in large spaces - expos, zoos, museums, and shopping malls. The product had a huge market in the making. The immense popularity of Android devices for business use or for e-learning made having a mobile device management solution imperative. The founding team at ProMobi quickly realised the potential of the product and went on to scale it further, making it a cross-platform, intuitive solution to manage consumer as well as custom devices. The rest is history.

From offering an Android Kiosk specific solution, Scalefusion as a product has now grown into a full-blown Mobile Device and Endpoint Management product that is loved and used by 8000+ customers across the globe. Scalefusion is now an industry-agnostic and go-to Device Management solution for managing diverse endpoints across Android, iOS, macOS and Windows devices.

Catering to SMBs

The upsurge of mobile devices in business has been exponential ever since. “Soon enough we realised that there were big players catering to the mobile device management (MDM) market, but were complex and expensive. No solution provider was catering towards the SMBs and their needs, and that’s how we decided to scale up the existing kiosk technology solution to build a full-blown product called Scalefusion,” says Harishanker Kannan, Co-founder and CEO, ProMobi Technologies.

Today, as the product has evolved significantly, the problem statement that Pune-based ProMobi Technologies is addressing is no longer limited to kiosk technology. Rather, it now works to offer enterprise mobility solutions to SMBs and also to large corporations, given the deep penetration of mobile devices across diverse domains.

“We aim to build a feature stack that addresses specific problems of our users, without compromising on the simplicity of our solution. Our live chat-based technical support enables our customers to shorten the learning curve of using our product,” adds Harishanker.

What sets it apart?

A key USP of ProMobi Tech is its simple, easy-to-use platform with a short learning curve. “The customers’ pain points are at the core of our innovation and we take immense pride in presenting one of the most clutter-free tools for endpoint management in the market. Our dedicated team assists our customers during every step of the onboarding journey and thereafter, provides critical pre-sales and post-sales support, irrespective of the deployment size,” he says.

As a bootstrapped company, Harishanker feels that one of their most significant landmarks has been to become profitable. “Our greatest landmark is scaling our kiosk solution, which was purely Android-based, to becoming a full-fledged MDM that supports Android, iOS, macOS as well as Windows 10 device management,” he adds.

The pandemic has been a game changer for several tech companies. “When we moved to remote working at the beginning of March 2020, our team had a smooth transition with minimal hiccups. With in-person sales and expos coming to a standstill, the possibility of new customers discovering us was heavily a marketing task. Also, sales closure took longer since several businesses were impacted negatively,” shares Harishanker.

But the silver lining to this dark cloud, he says, was the increased mobile adoption, along with the increased penetration of mobile technology in remote working and learning, which opened up a huge market segment.

Reliance on DigitalOcean's cloud solutions

Scalefusion, a flagship product of ProMobi Tech, is a cloud-based MDM solution that helps businesses manage their diverse endpoints with ease. “The management includes enabling the endpoints with business-specific apps and content, applying policies for usage, troubleshooting device issues without physical IT intervention, securing the endpoints against misuse, theft, and protecting the corporate data on it. Therefore, it is a 100 percent cloud-based solution, and hence, the role of cloud here is indispensable,” he adds.

ProMobi Technologies has been using DigitalOcean since 2014. “Our first product, Scalefusion, started as a single DigitalOcean Droplet (Q3 of 2014), reached “product-market fit” in about a year, and now runs on more than 100+ Droplets within DigitalOcean cloud. We have also used DigitalOcean Volumes to store large files, OS images, etc, integrated DNS and Firewall, to name a few,” he says.

DigitalOcean has successfully ensured a host of tech solutions to Promobi Tech like predictable bandwidth and infrastructure cost, easy onboarding, operational simplicity, integrated DNS and Firewall, several types of droplets to run specialised workloads, and of course, the managed services.

Harishanker also added that DigitalOcean greatly impacted their developer productivity, platform efficiency, and most importantly, reducing cost with a predictable bandwidth, along with having the API allowed internal tooling integration, and simplified operational challenges. “It is probably due to our planning and the better offering by DigitalOcean that enabled us to scale faster,” he adds.

The developers at Promobi Tech also benefited from the varied solutions offered by DigitalOcean. “We run many experiments frequently and DigitalOcean gives us the ability to quickly deploy those experiments and measure their effectiveness. Besides, the managed services provide peace of mind when the developers want to focus more on the product side of things and a bit less on the infrastructure,” he says.

“Our growth roadmap involves developing businesses with relevant feature sets such as mobile threat defense and OS patch management. Thus, to manage more of these devices, our infrastructure needs are only going to grow. The Managed Kubernetes service of DigitalOcean is one such exciting option that we intend to explore,” shares Harishanker.

“DigitalOcean gives us that perfect option to grow and manage a large number of droplets located in geographically disparate locations. This has the potential to prepare your business for future data localisation regulations,” he explains.

Future trends and growth

“To stay ahead of the competition, we will continue to do what we do best - putting our customers first. We are aimed at identifying the needs of our customers and their business problems, while developing specific solutions and features instead of simply expanding our feature set,” says Harishanker.

Technology trends that promote remote working, remote learning or remote ‘everything’ excites ProMobi Tech, along with the increased mobile adoption for the frontline workforce. “These need a reliable, scalable MDM solution to make it effective, and we provide exactly that,” he explains.

“The growing adoption of IoT-based solutions in business use and 5G are some of the most exciting innovations we expect to see in our domain. It’s not the question of ‘if’ and ‘when’ but ‘how’ well-prepared businesses are when it comes to leveraging these technologies for better business outcomes, putting the onus of efficient management of the same on MDM solutions such as ours,” concludes Harishanker.