Co-Sys: Open Codes of Student-Teacher Interactions

While the Swami Keshvanand Institute of Technology (SKIT) in Jaipur was busy looking for ways to digitise its administrative and educational tasks through a commercial ERP solution, four of its third-year engineering students sensed this need not just at the SKIT but at other educational institutes as well. Ayush Pandey, Shubham Paliwal, Shubham Kela and Manish Lakhara founded Co-Sys as a campus company with the help of their faculty.
 
Three of them are students of computer engineering and are, therefore, inclined to develop such projects by training. But, the maturity that they have already achieved in the concept right from the coding stage to the marketing is impressive, which can develop into a full-fledged, workable enterprise by the time they leave college. They have decided to build it on open-source architecture LAMP. 
 
At the outset, the Co-Sys team makes it clear that it is not into social media, hence stamping a tone of seriousness into the project or its talk. It wants to sell the idea to colleges for the management of all its administrative needs, including the interaction, both academic as well non-academic, with students. They have proposed notice boards, attendance applications, students' interaction with teachers, content sharing, extra-curricular spaces, etc. They plan to have cloud and offline models for these colleges and also want to have restricted set of applications of this solution available on mobile devices. 
 
Their revenue model involves targeting advertisers who want to reach academic audiences and the college authorities which want to take extra activities online, hence buying premium features and using extra space and bandwidth. They have envisaged an investment of Rs 25 lakh, out of which they hope to get back Rs 15 lakh in the first year of its operation. They have calculated that with a clientèle of 50 colleges in a span of two years, they can easily recover the investment.
 
In the next stage, the Co-Sys team hopes to move beyond colleges and begin catering to the needs of universities. It plans to target open universities, since they have the need to reach out to their students who are based in different parts of the country. That's where they can make a killing.