How DNIF, a home-grown, bootstrapped open analytics platform, is holding its own in a segment dominated by heavyweights like IBM and HP
When Shomiron Das Gupta started DNIF in April 2017, an open analytics platform that uses deep-tech to identify outliers in user application and systems, the biggest challenge was not the business opportunity but business rivals.
“We faced competition from giants like IBM, HP and Splunk,” he says. While the bigwigs had the might to sell naturally, DNIF had to work really hard to sell their product. “The first big challenge was to stand out,” he says.
The efforts seem to have paid off. From Rs 5 crore in revenue in March 2019, DNIF is on track to close March 2020 at revenues of Rs 20 crore. It has clients across sectors including BFSI, manufacturing and defence, across India and North America. “Cybersecurity was very linear in the initial days but today it has become very dynamic and distributed in nature,” he says in an interview with Forbes India. Edited excerpts:
Q. Your revenues leapfrogged last year…
The year 2019 was brilliant. We multiplied almost three times. Customers are now realising the need for an analytics platform that can scale across use cases and industry challenges, and I am not just talking about cyber security here; the same platform could be applied to several other spaces such as finance, fraud detection, analysis, etc. We identified this need by listening to our customers.
Organisations are generating humongous volumes of high-quality, high-fidelity data through their systems, servers, applications and network devices. Manually sifting through, validating and comprehending the crux of such large amounts of data is humanly impossible. This was the problem encountered in the last decade and then, systems were built to process huge amounts of data.
We moved to the next level, and started looking for specific attack patterns hidden in the ocean of data. But the problem was that we were only as good as our knowledge of the attacks. In essence, we were overly dependent on our repository of known threats to identify malicious behaviour, which don’t always keep up with the latest threats. Thieves don’t really come dressed in black-and-white striped t-shirts, right?