By Allan Maurer
CARY, NC—When the economy goes awry, many organizations—including school systems—cannot go on doing business as usual and turn to technology to trim costs. Software as a Service in particular gives systems large and small access to technology to manage facility use and maintenance, IT and business operations, says SchoolDude president and co-founder Lee Prevost.
SchoolDude, founded in 1999, employees 140 people and has about 3,800 school districts, colleges and private schools at clients. With about 25,000 such entities in North America alone, they’re not likely to run out of new client targets soon.
Provost will discuss the success of the SaaS model on a panel at TechJournal South’s Internet Summit next week (Wednesday, Nov. 19) at Chapel Hill’s Friday Center.
The nearly sold-out Summit, presented by TJS, the NC Council for Entrepreneurial Development, and Southern Capitol Ventures, brings together hundreds of Web 2.0 companies, executives, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and others. (To register see: www.internetsummitevent.com).
The company’s software streamlines three major parts of school organizations, Prevost says. Facility management (work orders, preventative maintenance scheduling, etc.); IT management (trouble tickets, such as a printer not working and so on); and business functions (scheduling use of school facilities such as the ball fields, after school programs, community events and so forth).
While the company has large clients such as Wake County in North Carolina and Broward County in Florida (with 270,000 students), it also serves smaller ones such as a district in Alaska with 23 kids.
“One of the reasons we’ve been successful,” says Prevost, “is that most school districts, but especially smaller, rural ones, could not afford technology based solutions the old way, where a company had to fly a team out to load the software and train people and districts and to buy hardware and allocated IT resources.
Software as a Service enables smaller and mid-sized districts to be up and running in hours for a few dollars a student a year.
“It doesn’t have the complexity for them that it used to. Smaller districts look at this as a bargain because they could not have even considered the alternative installed versions.”
The company prices its on demand service based on enrollment. That means even the smallest school districts can afford technology that once would have been prohibitively expensive. “They use the same exact software platform,” says Prevost. Costs range from a few hundred dollars a year up to $100,000 a year.
SchoolDude’s five-person executive team worked together previously at Applied Computer Technology, which delivered software the old way.
“We had a facility management system we sold to school districts around the country, but only the largest could consider it,” says Prevost. “So I have arrows in my back from doing it the old way.”
That previous era is quickly moving to the Web and on demand solutions, he says, although it does have one barrier to entry for software companies.
“The SaaS model is brutal on the front end,” he says. “It requires a lot of sustained losses as you build a recurring revenue stream. But we’ve survived and we’re doing well. We plow positive cash flow back into growth, increasing our footprint and creating new product options.”
So far the down economy has not negatively affected SchoolDude’s business, Prevost says.
“So far so good. We just came back from a conference of school business officials, the main conference we market through, and attendance was up 30 percent. It’s almost a paradox. We think next year might be different and we’ll see some budget tightening. There’s always a lag between the economy and the public sector.”
Still, he points out, “In some ways it (the down economy) helps us. Our biggest competitor is the status quo, for a school district to run things the way it always did, using Excel spread sheets, all paper-based.
“But when the economy gets tight, it makes that option not feasible. They can’t hire more staff and have to look to automation and technology based solutions at the only option.”
The public sector is economy resistant if not economy proof, he adds. “The economy is going to have an impact, but it’s an area I would much rather be working in than say the automotive sector.”
Thus far the company certainly has more than held its own. “We’re told by one financial firm that we’re in the top 25 percent of the SaaS industry in revenue size,” says Prevost.
“We were on Deloitte’s list of the 500 fastest growing companies and the fastest growing software firm in North Carolina last year, so we’ve been blessed with a lot of good opportunities.”
On the Web: www.schooldude.com
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