Profile: BYJU’s – The Learning App
BYJU’S – The Learning App is the popular brand name for Think and Learn Private Ltd., a Bengaluru-based educational technology (edtech) and online tutoring company. They have recently received large-scale attention from students across India and attracted investors from across the globe, and BYJU’S was the first company to receive investment in Asia from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. They are currently India’s most funded education start-up and considered to be among the only few Indian consumer startups that have gone global, particularly with the 2017 acquisition of Tutor Vista.
Their flagship product, a smartphone app named BYJU’S-The Learning App, has been available since August 2015 and delivers educational content to school students from grades 4 to 12 (primary to higher secondary level education). The company trains students for competitive examinations in India including IIT-JEE, NEET, CAT, and IAS and also for international examinations such as GRE and GMAT. BYJU’S reports to have over 15 million users and 9,000,000 paid subscribers on an annual basis with an annual retention rate of 90%.
Challenges
Being headquartered in Bangalore, India and having a vast client base across the country, BYJU’S found it difficult to transfer their large collection of video tutorials to users at efficient speeds. When beginning as a start-up, BYJU’S used traditional FTP as their core file transfer method. This became a time-consuming process as the size of their video collection grew over time. They now have a collection of 100’s of sessions with video content ranging from 5-25 GB per session, all of which needs to be transferred to various users around the world. BYJU’S began looking for an alternative file transfer solution that could replace FTP and enhance transfer speeds irrespective of latency or packet loss.
Solutions
BYJU’S decided to go for a simple solution that was simple to deploy and use – FileCatalyst. FileCatalyst’s flagship solution, FileCatalyst Direct, was able to send their large video files securely and reliably over their 50 Mbps network. They also opted for FileCatalyst Express – a tool which helps the production crew upload and download content at accelerated speeds.
FileCatalyst Express, a one of that kind solution that has is easy to use while including advanced features and file transfer acceleration, was an ideal solution For users who required a simple interface like that of FTP. An instance of FileCatalyst Server was deployed at the Bangalore site, and clients can access the content on the server with accelerated speeds via the FileCatalyst Express application, making it an ideal solution for manual file transfers.
Results
BYJU’S has been very happy with the file transfer acceleration provided by FileCatalyst, giving their users access to all of their tutorial videos at full line speed. The installation and deployment was also a very easy process for the team managing file transfers. Transfer tasks that once took hours are now completed in minutes and the FileCatalyst Express application helps make file transfers a hassle-free process.