Spearheading DCT Inc. and dcafé, creating custom made solutions to help businesses unlock their full potential is all in a day’s work for Vineet Dhawan. 

From his humble beginnings in the technology world 23 years ago, Vineet Dhawan has come a long way. As CEO of both Digital Convergence Technologies, Inc. and dcafé, two marquee organisations that are at the cutting edge of digital transformation, Dhawan looks back at how he built both organisations from the ground up and led them from one milestone to another. 

Almost all aspects of business operations are digitised today but Dhawan saw this need-gap back in 2006 when he laid the foundation of DCT Inc. Headquartered in the US with strategic delivery centres in Mumbai and Pune, DCT Inc. has been a pioneer in adopting new technologies to drive solutions that have transformed businesses across multiple industries. To impact the digital well-being of a business, DCT Inc. allows organisations to continue doing what they are great at while allowing them to reach their full potential from a technology point of view. “When we work with somebody, we want to be the partner of choice while showing them potential methods to achieve growth”, says Dhawan. 

DCT’s greatest strength is its ability to envision a solution, build prototypes to arrive at the product and take it to market. The organisation specialises in working through the entire lifecycle – right from conceptualisation to go-to-market strategies and sale. For one of the biggest management consultancies in the world, arriving at the minimum viable product itself took multiple rounds of reiterations. But from there, DCT Inc. proceeded to build an end-to-end model which included support, delivery and deployment functions and the client was successfully able to build an entire business around it. 

Built on a strong value and belief-based system, DCT Inc. has become a force to reckon with, a statement that is justified by the fortune 100 companies in its portfolio and its year-on-year growth trajectory. However, Dhawan states that his biggest achievement is the organisation’s client relationships which are built on trust, transformation and lasting partnerships. 

While Dhawan was building multiple enterprise-grade products for industries, he noticed a blatant gap in the media and entertainment business, in which he saw great potential. ‘We noticed the OTT industry was ready to explode and we took it upon ourselves to build a robust product in this space.’ says Dhawan. With DCT Inc.’s lineage of building industry-grade products, they quickly set to work building a solution for one of the largest M&E players in India. 

The industry gap ensured there was a significant divide between content aggregators and technology solutions. Also, content aggregators wanted to focus solely on content, without wanting to get their hands dirty dealing with the technical aspects. Seeing this as an opportunity, dcafé or the digital cafe went to market in 2018 to transform the media and entertainment space. “I would shy away from saying its sole focus is media and entertainment because the way dcafé is built, it offers one of the best in its class video streaming management systems to clients across the spectrum, giving them a much-desired end to end ecosystem. Today when clients who have no technical expertise approach us, all they have to do is map a couple of expectations across our end-to-end systems and they’re ready to step into the OTT pool.”, says Dhawan. 

Today, dcafé’s biggest strengths are ease of use, dynamic capabilities, monetization models, robust integrations across 12+ platforms while being one of the most cost-efficient players in the market. With an extensive roadmap already planned out for the future, dcafé’s biggest success has been validation to their proprietary technology from fortune 50 partnerships around the world. 

When asked about what’s in store for both organisations in the future, Dhawan says “Continuously innovate to adapt to the new world order its fair share of challenges from a digitization perspective. This has been our philosophy for the last many years and we’ll carry that forward. It’s a cliched saying that you don’t do different things, you just do things differently. It is the simple things that make the biggest impact. We simplify things with the right technologies and our job is to innovate to simplify. That’s what we do differently and that’s why we are in business.”