By Harshal Kallyanpur
 Broadllyne, a Mumbai-based software services company developing solutions for the education sector, plans to increase its presence across the country. Currently, operating in Mumbai, Pune and New Delhi, the company will set up offices in 12 more cities by 2009. Its flagship products, namely, SchoolExcel and College Excel are sold on a user basis and are currently deployed in over 150 schools and colleges. With over 2.5 lakh users, the company is targeting to grow this number to over 7.5 lakh by 2009.
“India has over 50,000 private schools, over 9 lakh government schools and around 4.5 lakh colleges. For a company which provides software to educational institutions where the student is the primary customer, this is a large customer base. We feel the market has been growing at a rate of 30 percent annually, and there is interest from the government to privatize a few of its educational institutes. We feel the growth potential for this market is huge,” observed Shantanu Rooj, Managing Director, Broadllyne.
Broadllyne, which started out as an Internet Service Provider in 2001, started providing managed software services to educational institutions about a year ago, has seen substantial growth. It is expecting to touch a yearly growth rate of 400 percent. The company plans to target private institutes such as coaching classes, in addition to the traditional schools, colleges, and universities. While it follows a direct sales strategy for marketing its solutions, the company employs a team of 45 people for research and development activities and has over 55 employees to handle delivery and professional services.
SchoolExcel and CollegeExcel provide an efficient way of collecting and managing data across an educational institute. The solutions use an ERP based model and is developed under the .net framework. This enables the principal and the school management to have an updated view of the entire data, which can assist in making decisions. A functionality of updating parents daily, on when their child has left the school via an SMS is also included. This functionality can be extended to deliver a student’s exam or attendance record.
The solution is delivered as a managed service. Once a school or college is ready to try the software, they can use it for free for a month. If the institute wishes to use the software further they can do so by paying an average cost ranging from Rs 20 to Rs 50 per student. These costs include the cost of maintaining the software, the SMS service, and anti-virus and firewall installations. They also provide regular updates to the solutions every six months.
“Running a software solution for a school or a college, has been a difficult process till now. Firstly, the solutions are designed to provide minimum features, that too only at the administrative level, without any participation of the parents. Very few of them are updated on a regular basis. Also the school or college has to handle the cost of installation of the solution, training the manpower and maintenance costs and other costs like anti virus and firewall licenses,” said Rooj. “Providing an SMS service and installing and maintaining servers would also increase the cost of a solution if a school or a college was to deploy a similar solution on their own,” he added.
At the back end, the company has its own database servers which store the data from its customers. T he company runs its own data center, which is allocated an area of 500 sq. ft., with standard Intel based rack servers. At the user level the solutions are deployed in an environment with a minimum requirement of six computers and a broadband network. Thus, the users end up paying only for using the service which includes everything from installation and use to the maintenance of the solution.
|