Universities are supposed to be once-in-a-lifetime experience but far too often it ends up being chaotic, or even traumatic because of the numerous restrictions and requirements the young adults are suddenly expected to live up to. The divide between students and faculty or administration, whether related to dues or attendance mishaps, doesn’t help either. But a local startup is trying to alleviate this problem.

Campus on Cloud is a student information system (SIS) operating out of Lahore that offers a complete portal to educational institutions. It brings all stakeholders from administration to faculty and students to a platform.

Starting from the admissions — comprising the online application and evaluation — down to graduation, the portal handles it all, including the fee payments and collections. Not only that, the faculty members can dispatch grades or schedule their classes while students can check their attendance or enroll for courses.

The startup was launched in early 2018 by Salman Akhtar and Kewan Khawaja -- alumni of Massachusetts Institute of Technology — working in tech for over 20 years. “We already had a long legacy in the higher education space and were approached by Peshawar’s Rahman Medical College for a personalised solution. Instead, we decided to build a product that will be managed by us and we would be the ones making the investments in it and thus came Campus on Cloud,” Akhtar recalls.

So we are talking about a solution catering to higher education institutions, but how many are there anyway in Pakistan? As per the Higher Education Commission figures, there are 214 universities in the country. With a majority of those belonging to the public sector and thus not known for tech adoption, isn’t the maximum addressable market a bit too small?

“Pakistan allowed us the opportunity to serve as our stepping stone by getting the initial customers and refine the product. But it’s not our sole focus, just one part. We are now eyeing Southeast Asian nations where we have past experience in implementing Peoplesoft,” explains co-founder Khawaja.

“In the developing world, there are more than 85,000 universities and colleges with enrollment in the for-profit ones on the rise. All in all, that makes up for an annual addressable market worth one billion dollars. Moreover, the solution is not bound by the size of the institution. Among our existing customers, we have one with a 1,000 member strong student body and another with 19,000, so it’s suitable for all,” Akhtar adds.

Speaking of the competitive landscape, the local market is largely untapped. But beyond Pakistan, there are some pretty big names, including Ellucian’s Banner and Peoplesoft - owned by Oracle. The question is how can a much smaller software firm from Lahore, with far fewer resources, take on these gorillas?

“Their technology is a bit outdated. At the time they were built, cloud hadn’t infiltrated the market while ours was written on it from scratch and thus offers a more nimble experience. Plus they are focused on over-sized American and European universities with a very expensive offering that few schools in the non-western world can afford. On the other hand, we have a more relevant product for this side of the world and doesn’t drain the client tens of millions of dollars,” says Khawaja.

Then there are a host of other SIS too, including that of Workday, which interestingly was started by Peoplesoft’s founder CEO David Duffield and former chief strategist Aneel Bhusri after their company’s hostile takeover by Oracle.

Being platform-as-a-service, the startup makes money by charging a one-time implementation fee plus the annual licence which is based on a per-user (student) cost, that in turn depends on both the size of an institute and the country grouping (low or middle income).

That’s not all though, as the duo plans to introduce an ad-based monetisation channel targeting the student population and connecting them with relevant services/products, be it travel offers or food deals. Meanwhile for the funds, they have put in around $1.5 million of their own money while externally raising another $1m three years back but Akhtar feels money is hard to come by in Pakistan.

“A solution with similar scale and metrics would have bagged in an eight-digit round elsewhere, but unfortunately the ticket size here is much smaller and local venture capitals are unable to write big cheques,” he says.

However, all the top-down market analysis aside, the magnitude of the solution and its costs warrant a lot of decision making on part of the educational institutes, which in turn leads to boringly long sales cycles. Hence, unlike the business-to-consumer players, it can get tricky to post the same kind of growth figures even if the potential recurring revenue is highly lucrative.

The writer is member of staff:

m.mutaherkhan@gmail.com

Twitter: @MutaherKhan

Published in Dawn, June 14th, 2020