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It's a beginning of a new era in the education vertical. With the education in India, all set to be thrown open to foreign direct investment, the sector is clearly on a growth trajectory.

There is a huge potential in the market, as India supports one of the largest higher education systems in the world with about 17,000 colleges. What makes this vertical even more interesting is the fact that the government is opening up the vertical, which so far has been heavily regulated.

Once FDI is allowed in the higher education one would see lot of foreign universities setting up campuses in India in the next two to three years. Industry experts point out that these factors will drive IT deployment in education.

Putting House in Order
No wonder, putting house in order by managing the admission process and recruitment life cycle, and integrating systems and processes in place to have real time information flow, becomes crucial in this scenario.

More and more educational institutes are feeling the pressure to measure, analyze, and report on many aspects of their student population. Showing the returns to the institution on the operational costs of recruiting, course offerings, and financing programs of students, is becoming increasingly important. Fragmented data, rising education costs, increasing global competition for students, faculty and staff, and heightened regulatory requirements are all adding up to further driving the need for these institutions to focus on core business of education.

Need of the Hour
At the moment, majority of the universities are on multiple systems and are not integrated. However, now the educational institutes are realizing the need to align all systems in order to reach global standards.

One of the country's leading B schools, the Indian School of Business (ISB) implemented the SAP's Higher Education and Research solution. ISB had standalone systems in the various department and data; there wasn't any real time access, which lead to delayed and inaccurate decisions a lot of times. There was need to have a seamless flow of data, and that made ISB look at having a comprehensive ERP.

Campus Management
Leading vendors now are offering applications which take care of campus management. A killer application however, would be one which would integrate all platforms that include campus management, academic management, scheduling, grant management etc. Campus management includes the admission (on line applications), enrollment, module registration, examinations and grading, degree audits, graduation and alumni management.

This is the core administration work and to a large extent these functions are being automated using enterprise applications.

Betting Big
While the market is just beginning to flutter, the industry is betting big on it. However, it is still a very nascent industry, but key organizations are clearly recognizing the need of IT deployment. Industry watchers are confident that it will be a hot area in the near future.

Urvashi Kaul
urvashik@cybermedia.co.in

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