BharatSync: Keeping in Sync with the Needs of India's Masses

For an organization that has less than 100 employees, rolling out push mail and PIM sync services across the country is no easy task given the scale of operations of BSNL and MTNL, with which they have tied up with. With features such as on-premise hosting support, a web-based dashboard for editing PIM data as well as Pull-N-Push mode support to cater to users with low data allowance, BharatSync has set an example of how technology can be used to reach out to a far larger number of people by developing software in an alternate way. BharatSync supports more than 7000 handsets.

How the jury voted

Using a combination of technologies such as J2ME, VC++.NET, Objective - C, C#, etc., they have made sure to maximize the reach of their software. This speaks volumes about the complexity of the software to a large extent, said one of our jury, Vinod Unny.

It was not easy for the jury to settle on the first spot to be given to BharatSync. Its closest competition, ePravesh, claims to affect only about 30,000 students so far as compared to about 2 lakh subscribers of BharatSync. Another jury member, Shekhar Govindarajan, was of the opinion that in India, education has much more importance in terms of impact compared to being able to access push mail. However, Singh said that it must be kept in mind that a company of this size has even thought of entering a field dominated by a highly successful vendor and has also succesfully managed to implement the same. According to Juneja, while BharatSync does not offer something very unique from a core functionality point-of-view, the same is also applicable to some extent to its closest competitor, ePravesh, since such (centralized application) systems have been in existence in various parts of India for several years.

Any kind of internet connectivity (including Wi-Fi) is supported, so a dedicated tariff plan for the same from the service provider is not required. It supports touchscreens and keypads and is optimized for different screen resolutions. Push mail as of today is no longer the exclusive domain of one vendor. However, the single biggest reason for BharatSync to grab the top spot was its independence of device manufacturer as well as telecom service provider. Nokia's Ovi Push mail, for instance, is supported only on a subset of Nokia's handsets and not all of them. Thus, existing push mail solutions are handset-dependent, whereas BharatSync is not. This makes it possible for users to easily switch between devices and operators while keeping all of their data (mails, calendar, contacts, notes and tasks) backed up on the BharatSync server, ready to be used soon after purchasing a new device. This is especially useful in case of loss/theft of the device, since your data stays with you even if you chose another manufacturer's handset and use another operator's services with it. This, combined with low-cost access to push mail and PIM sync, results in much larger access to push e-mail by the masses on the move, and that is evident by the commercial success of BharatSync.