eduSTACK

EDUCATION SOLUTIONS

Srivas Arvind
Contents
Executive Summary....................................................................................................................................... 3
Company Overview ....................................................................................................................................... 4
Vision Statement ....................................................................................................................................... 4
Mission statement .................................................................................................................................... 4
Location..................................................................................................................................................... 4
Company objectives .................................................................................................................................. 4
Company strategy ..................................................................................................................................... 4
Industry Analysis ........................................................................................................................................... 5
Porter’s five forces model ............................................................................................................................. 5
Bargaining power of the customers:......................................................................................................... 5
Bargaining power of the supplier: ............................................................................................................ 5
Threat of substitute: ................................................................................................................................. 6
Competitor’s rivalry .................................................................................................................................. 6
Threat of new entrant:.............................................................................................................................. 6
SWOT Analysis............................................................................................................................................... 7
Strengths ................................................................................................................................................... 7
Weaknesses .............................................................................................................................................. 7
Opportunities ............................................................................................................................................ 7
Threats ...................................................................................................................................................... 7
Environmental analysis ................................................................................................................................. 8
Political factors.......................................................................................................................................... 8
Economic factors....................................................................................................................................... 8
Socio-cultural factors ................................................................................................................................ 8
Technological factors ................................................................................................................................ 8
Legal factors .............................................................................................................................................. 8
Environmental factors............................................................................................................................... 9
Hofstede model .......................................................................................................................................... 10
Power Distance ....................................................................................................................................... 10
Individualism ........................................................................................................................................... 10
Uncertainty avoidance ............................................................................................................................ 10
Masculinity .............................................................................................................................................. 10
Long Term Orientation ............................................................................................................................ 10

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Competitor’s Analysis ....................................................................................................................... 11
Marketing Objectives and Goals ................................................................................................................. 12
Situational analysis: ................................................................................................................................ 12
Marketing mix ............................................................................................................................................. 12
Products .................................................................................................................................................. 12
Place ........................................................................................................................................................ 13
Promotion ............................................................................................................................................... 13
Marketing budget ................................................................................................................................... 14
Sales Forecasts (Quarterly for 1st year) ................................................................................................... 15
Action Plan .................................................................................................................................................. 15
Operational Plan ......................................................................................................................................... 15
Value chain model: ................................................................................................................................. 15
Value Proposition .................................................................................................................................... 16
Value Chain Model .................................................................................................................................. 16
Operational Tools.................................................................................................................................... 17
Key Partners ............................................................................................................................................ 17
People ..................................................................................................................................................... 17
Business Transaction Process ................................................................................................................. 18
Release Lisences.......................................................................................................................................... 18
Redistribution Policy ................................................................................................................................... 19
Management plan ....................................................................................................................................... 19
Arvind Srivastav (Founder and CEO) ....................................................................................................... 19
Sunny Jacob (Growth Consultant)........................................................................................................... 19
MGK Vishnu (Chief Marketing Officer) ................................................................................................... 19
Lamchith M C (CTO) ................................................................................................................................ 20
Sharad Agiwal (CFO)................................................................................................................................ 20
Rameshwar M Paswan (Mentor) ............................................................................................................ 20
Boyaz M (Advisor) ................................................................................................................................... 20
Contingency Plan ........................................................................................................................................ 20
References .................................................................................................................................................. 21

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Executive Summary
In a highly changing world environment, school education system is also transforming, bringing
the technology in by building the digitally enabled classrooms, going forward to state of the art
technology and preparing the systems that enables students to take their courses online. The
schools now have a learning oriented infrastructure, a pool of co-curricular activities and a system
that allows the child gets the utmost attention, backed by the data. In this era, the teacher is not the
only one, who defines the students, but the data and statistics regarding the student must also
support him.
Looking at these facts, we have identified a need in the educational institutions which, if fulfilled,
can ease the management of the schools, colleges and other institutions. We are initiating a
business named eduSTACK that will cater this need by not only offering the software application
but offering an open source software for the ease of the schools, so as they can customize the
software as per their needs.
We are initiating the business from India and then we will take it to the whole world. We have
planned to release different updates for each continent as per their educational needs and
requirements.

Our business has marked cumulative profit of around $500,000 in the third year and is expected to
grow with the same pace in the coming few years. We have debt to equity ratio of 0.18 in the third
year which means that we have the payback period of three years. Total equity in the third year is
at $564,200 which is higher than the investment as well. This plan proves to be a liquidate
investment.

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Company Overview
EduSTACK is an open source school management application on Java technologies stack. This
application will include, School management system, ERP, CMS, SIS and many other services for
schools and other educational institutions.

Vision Statement
To become the world’s largest Company in Education technologies.

Mission statement
The mission of ‘eduSTACK’ is to provide consumers with the customizable application that
enables them to mold the application in a way that best fits their organizational needs.

Location
The company will be operated from India and will be selling online.

Company objectives
The main goal of the company is to have a global image as being the best solution provider in
software technology services. So our goals include:

Strategic goals:

The company after 10 years wants to see itself:

 One of the considerable competitors in the market of IT industry of India.
 Bring the awareness in all the educational institutes of India and major institutions
globally

Tactical goals:

We want our Company after 2 years to:

 Grab the market of major cities of India by more than 20 %
 To have more than 3 applications
 To launch two more applications in the pack

Company strategy
This software has been made with a larger aim in mind that caters to the greater good of the
community. In today’s mobile first world, let something made traditionally and that too just for
the desktop not hold the future thinking schools.

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Industry Analysis
India is the world's largest sourcing destination, accounting for approximately 55 per cent of the
US$ 146 billion market. The country's cost competitiveness in providing Information Technology
(IT) services, which is approximately 3-4 times cheaper than the US, continues to be its Unique
Selling Proposition (USP) in the global sourcing market.

India’s highly qualified talent pool of technical graduates is one of the largest in the world and is
available at a cost saving of 60-70 per cent to source countries. This large pool of qualified skilled
workforce has enabled Indian IT companies to help clients to save US$ 200 billion in the last five
years.

India’s IT industry amounts to 12.3 per cent of the global market, largely due to exports. Export
of IT services accounted for 56.12 per cent of total IT exports (including hardware) from India.
The Business Process Management (BPM) segment accounted for 23.46 per cent of total IT
exports during FY15. The IT-BPM sector is estimated to expand at a CAGR of 9.5 per cent to US$
300 billion by 2020.

The Government of India has extended tax holidays to the IT sector for software technology parks
of India (STPI) and Special Economic Zones (SEZs). Further, the country is providing procedural
ease and single window clearance for setting up facilities.

For our company, the market analysis is as follows:

Porter’s five forces model

Bargaining power of the customers:

From the marker analysis, it has been observed that customers bargain less when it comes
to technology related products and specially to customizable or open source software.
Customers in this era, want products that are more customized per their needs.
Keeping in view the demand of the consumers, our company has a huge competitive edge
because
 We are offering a software that will cater the needs of schools and colleges and
make the management easier.
 The software is an open source software which means that it can be customized
easily by the owners.

Bargaining power of the supplier:

In a service industry, we only require labor force and it is usually supplied by the industry.
India, in this regard have a pool of software engineers and IT experts and therefore, the
bargaining power of suppliers is less in our industry. However, once the coding is known
by a person, that person can exploit us, but the law keeps the patent owners on a safe side.

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Threat of substitute:
In the IT industry, substitutes can never be neglected, the technology industry is highly
dynamic and it keeps changing time to time so, there is a huge threat of the substitute. But,
we will cater this problem, by continuously updating our software and applications to
sustain an edge in the consumer minds.

Competitor’s rivalry
A huge number of companies operate in the market, apart from that few unorganized local
companies, the multi-national companies like, Fedena, Power School, cannot be neglected
while analyzing compatriots’ rivalry. This rivalry will be tackled by providing our
customers the best value in terms of health and quality.

Threat of new entrant:

Among all the porter’s five forces the most critical factor for us is of threat of new entrant,
anyone can easily start the same business in the same market. However this problem can
be solved by having a patent of our product, but still, the entry in our industry is very easy
and there are no such barriers to enter in to this market.

Porter's 5 Forces
Porter's 5 Forces

Supplier
10
8
6
4
New Entrant Customer
2
0

Rivalry Substitute

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SWOT Analysis

Strengths
 Open Source ERP
 This will allow customization
 Experience in the same industry hence good contacts
 Can use these contacts for better business relations
 Customer’s needs oriented offer
 The product offers solution to a big problem
 Experienced management and Workforce
 These people have knowledge about the market

Weaknesses
 Lack of Funds
 We can arrange the funds through banks and other sources.
 Software Bugs
 This weakness will be overcome by continuously evaluating the application

Opportunities
 9.5% Cumulative average growth of the IT industry in India
 Per the report of ibef.org
 Increasing trend of software and applications in schools
 Open source will help grab this opportunity
 Growing IT awareness among the people
 User friendly value proposition will help to grab this opportunity

Threats
 Threat of new entrant is very high
 Our positioning will be very helpful to tackle this threat
 Threat of substitute
 Continuous improvements will tackle substitutes
 Major giants’ rivalry
 We will work on Customer relationship management will tackle this issue.

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Environmental analysis
Environment for the business can be well analyzed using PESTLE analysis:

Political factors
India is known to be the biggest democracy in the world and hence, has achieved great
successes because of stable political conditions. Political situation very favorable for the
IT industry in India because, the government is taking steps to encourage the IT sector by
building STPI’s (Software technology parks of India) and SEZ’s (special economic zones).

Economic factors
Since, India introduced industrial reforms in 1991, it has seen significantly stable economy.
Improved GDP growth is seen on a year-on-year basis and it is known to be a big market.
IT industry has significant contributions in the economy as it is $250 billion market for
USA and it is expected that it will grow up to $300 billion up to 2020.

Socio-cultural factors
The socio-cultural factors of India also support our business, people of the country prefer
easiness in their lives as it is a fast-moving world, and people do not have much time invest
in writing things down and then managing all the things properly therefore, the need for
our product is high.

Technological factors
Due to growing competition in all markets every company is shifting to the best possible
technology available, growing globalization adds more value to this by giving access to the
foreign companies around the world and making the competition intense. Continuous
improvements in this regard are highly required in this regard.

Legal factors
For starting any company the law requires it to be registered, moreover a structured taxation
mechanism is also there for every company, apart from that few underground companies
working in the economy. Legally, IT industry is relaxed from many taxes and other issues
as well. Therefore, the legalities for our company are favorable.

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Environmental factors
With respect to environment India, it is considered one of the best countries for business
especially when it comes to Information Technology. India has a big pool of software
engineers and great educational institutes. The education is now dependent on the
information technology and this brings an opportunity for us. The environment is very
favorable for our economy.

PESTLE (Favorability)
PESTLE (Favorability)

Political
10
8
6
Ecvironmental Economical
4
2
0

Legal Social

Technological

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Hofstede model

Power Distance
India has an intermediate power distance, people want to dominate over others through
status and for their status maintenance they mostly spend money. Our product is at a
medium price, so everyone can buy our product, especially, those institutions will buy our
product that require an edge over the others.

Individualism
In India, people are more collectivistic, they think of others before themselves. Most of
them are not independent to take any decision, they mostly rely on their beloved one’s
advises, like If one’s friend suggests to purchase a product from XYZ company, he/she
will be more confident to buy from that company. So it might be difficult to build
confidence in consumers without relations. We are already in the market and have very
good relations in the market. But collectivism can be beneficial for our company, in a way
that people of India believe in long term relationships once we built trust in customers.
There are many chances that the relationship with that customer would be long lasting and
also we will be benefited from the word of mouth.

Uncertainty avoidance
The people of India believe in long term relationships and are risk averse. They do not want
to experience something new due to the threat of losses. Therefore, this might affect our
business in the beginning because it would be hard to grab the market share from the
existing players but once we are in the market and win the trust of the customers, it will be
easier to retain them because they will not shift easily. This will be very helpful for our
business.

Masculinity
In India, Masculinity is at middle, both male and female have their major roles in our
society. Therefore, our company will target both through our promotion.

Long Term Orientation

The time has changed now as before a decade, the Indians were long-term oriented but now
they have changed with the time and think for the advancement in their business. It may be
very beneficial for our organization as we will provide them the best services along with
the open source product.

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Competitor’s Analysis
Power School Fedena Entab Classdojo

Product Educational School School Classroom

Specialization Technology Management Entertainment designing
Products Long Long Narrow Narrow
Range
Pricing Medium High Medium Medium
Strategies
Availability Global Global India Global

Promotion Online Online Online + Online

Personal
Selling
Target Educational Educational Schools Schools
Market Institutions Institutions
Competition 10 7 6 5
Score

Scoring Criteria:
1-3 Low
3-6 Medium
6-10 High

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Marketing Objectives and Goals
The ultimate purpose of our marketing plan is to increase the market share. We need to increase
the sales to at least 20% over every upcoming year by developing certain marketing strategies.
The objectives of our marketing plan will be in the first year will be:

 Create 80% awareness of our products among the target market

 Make contracts with Software developers and bloggers by using Personal relations,
meeting them personally and by providing discounts as well
 Make relationships with School and college administrators using PR and providing.
 Get customer loyalty of at least 70% for long-term relationship and better word of mouth
 Give customers a 100% satisfaction by providing the best quality products

Situational analysis:
A huge number of the companies like entab, NIIT Technologies, Power School etc. operate in the
market and contains a good market share. The basic issue with their offerings is that their products
are not open source and they do not offer such customization. However, if they offer
customizations, they charge high prices. Therefore, the customer need of customized product is
yet to be tapped and our offering best fits in to this.

Marketing mix
Products
We are offering 3 product package at the beginning and then we may offer more products
in our product line. Continues updates will be made to our products and we can make a lot
of improvements in the existing applications as well. The Open Source ERP products that
we offer are as follows:

 Workflow Management

 Organization of Institutional processes

 Digital School Diary

 Homework to be sent on application installed on parent’s phone

 Specific Release for every continent.

 Different updates for different continents as per their needs

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  Price

 Initial
 Depends on the customer
 Annual Subscription
 $500 to $2000

Place
We plan to operate through India and then move forward to the different countries of the
world. We will operate online and then we may physically meet the clients, whenever, we
will receive big orders.

Promotion
We aim to promote our products using different ways, which include:

 Blogs

A whole lot of developers will be targeted and different bloggers will be targeted
to enhance the awareness of our products.

 Social Media

The next arena for our marketing will be social media because almost everyone
uses social media these days.

 Conferences

We will mark our presence in the conferences to know about what is happening
around the world in the developers' community and then we must market our
product there.

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Marketing budget
The marketing budget of the company is distributed as under:

Marketing budget

Personal
Selling
32% Social Media
Social Media
Conferences
32%
Blogs
Personal Selling
Conferences
20%
Blogs
16%

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Sales Forecasts (Quarterly for 1st year)

Action Plan
We are establishing our business initially in India and then globally, by creating sustainable
customer relationship with our customers and the use of our existing contacts. Our marketing team
will be leading this and we will have the following objectives to cover.

 Grab at least 10% market share in the major cities of India by making contacts with the
people as our business is service related and services work on the basis of customer
relationships.
 Make strong relationships with customers by going with the strategy “customer is always
right”

Operational Plan
Value proposition: The value proposition of the company is to serve the education community by
providing them an open source software to cater their needs properly.

Value chain model:

The company firmly believes in providing highest value to all the partners that it takes
while creating this value chain, we want to serve our end customer by undergoing the
following process.

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Value Proposition
Customizable Service Availability Price
Applications
Providing We will provide We will ensure We will provide
customization to a 24/7 service the availability the solution to a
our customers online, for any of our product big problem
will enhance assistance online and if which means we
their trust in us regarding our there is a big will provide more
and also they offerings. order, we will at affordable
will get what prefer personal rates.
they require. selling.

Value Chain Model

Hire experienced Latest equipment will be Open Software package will

developers bought source/Customizable be offered
products

To get best in the To build a better Cater the needs of To get the customer
software and software and application every kind of customer loyalty and different
application faster other benefits
Inbound activities:

Feel the value

Every user of eduSTACK must feel that they are using something that has greater value.

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Operational Tools
We will require:

 Office Building
 Furniture
 Latest Computers
 Developing tools
 Transit Vehicle
 Air Conditioner
 Office supplies

Key Partners
Our key partners will be

 Developers
 Schools and Colleges
 Bloggers
 Managers
Contacts will be made with them to provide better services.

People
Position No of Resource

Senior Developer ( CTO ) - 5+ Years’ experience 1

Developer Java - 3+ Years’ experience 2

Developer Fresher - 0-1+ Years’ experience 2

Sr. Android Developer - 3+ years’ experience 1

Android Developer- 1-2 Years’ experience 1

Designer - 2+ years’ experience 1

QA Engineer - 1+ years’ Experience 1

Community manager, Blogger, SEO, SMO, PPC 1

Office expenses 1

Total 11

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Business Transaction Process

Operatioins
• Extensive • selling the
marketing to get • Develop the software and
the orders from software provide after
the buyers according to the sales services
consumer needs.
Inbound Outbound
activities activities

Release Lisences
 Apache License or New BSD License
 Apache license - can freely use, modify, distribute and sell a software licensed under the
Apache License without worrying about the use of software: personal, internal or
commercial.
 This license explicitly grants rights to users that can be applied to both copyrights and
patents, unlike other permissive licenses that are applicable only to copyrights and not
patents. The rights given are perpetual, worldwide, irrevocable, but also non-exclusive
— so you can use the licensed work, and so can anyone else.
 If you redistribute software with any Apache licensed components, you must include a
copy of the license, provide a clear Apache License attribution, and add modification
notices to all the files that you modify.
 New BSD License - BSD licenses are a family of permissive free software licenses,
imposing minimal restrictions on the redistribution of covered software. ... The original
BSD license was used for its namesake, the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), a Unix-
like operating system.
 Copyright <YEAR> <COPYRIGHT HOLDER>

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Redistribution Policy
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted
if the following conditions are met:

 Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of
conditions and the following disclaimer.

 Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of
conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials
provided with the distribution.

 Neither the name of the copyright holder nor the names of its contributors may be used
to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior
written permission.

Management plan
Our team that is undertaking this business is very much efficient and energetic, we have a lot of
experience of the market and we have been working in the IT industry for many years. The
management of our company includes the following:

Arvind Srivastav (Founder and CEO)

Young, energetic and the person of a very proactive nature, the best thing about him is that
he is a good team leader. He has five years of working in the school solutions and has
proved to be very innovative in his field. Srivastav’s communication skills and the human
skills best select him to become the CEO of the company.

Sunny Jacob (Growth Consultant)

Sunny is currently the JEA Secretary and he is best known in his social circle as being one
of the most hardworking guy and he is very good at building strong relationships with the
customers, moreover, his hardworking nature best select him for the department of
operations where he assumes the responsibility of growing the business.

MGK Vishnu (Chief Marketing Officer)

Mr. Vishnu is a very experienced and expert marketer. He is known for his marketing skills
in the market and he will definitely prove himself in marketing our product at his best.

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Lamchith M C (CTO)
Lamchith will be the CTO at the company, he has vast experience in this field.

Sharad Agiwal (CFO)

Mr. agiwal is Chief Finance Officer of the company. He is an expert finance person and
best fits for our Company.

Rameshwar M Paswan (Mentor)

Mr. Paswan is an engineer and has experience of around 10 years in the oil and gas industry, he
is well known to the market.

Boyaz M (Advisor)
Mr. Boyaz has an extensive experience of around 10 years of managing the schools. He is
currently, the principal of CBSE schools and has helped us in this project.

Contingency Plan
Every business in the market does not prove to be a success. Even the failure ratio in the businesses
is higher than those of successors. Therefore, we have got contingency plans for some of the
external factors that are not in our hands and those factors that will not allow us to operate our
business. If we fail to operate our business we will:

 Shift this software and target to companies for managing their employees
 Make this open source software available to the public at the lower rates
 Use all the resources to make other innovative software and applications
 Become a software house to sell the software

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References

http://pestleanalysis.com/pestle-analysis-india/

http://www.entlab.fi/eng/company.html

https://www.classdojo.com/

http://www.fedena.com/

https://www.powerschool.com/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Java_programming_language_logo.svg

https://www.hackerrank.com/challenges/java-stack

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