Edu 2.0: Corporate Edition

After much deliberation, I've finally decided to create two more education companies in Q1 2008.

My current online company, edu 2.0, is focused on schools (K-12 and college) and is growing by a healthy 10% every week. Its e-learning platform is already quite advanced and getting better every day. But since corporate e-learning is a multi-billion dollar marketplace, it seems silly to not leverage my investment in the edu 2.0 e-learning platform and apply it to the corporate space. Especially since I used to be a corporate instructor and have decent experience in that area.

The first new company will take ownership of the edu 2.0 e-learning platform and license it to whoever wants a state-of-the-art education platform to build on. edu 2.0 will license the platform from this new company.

The second new company will also license the e-learning platform and then re-license it on a subscription basis to corporations that want a low-cost, feature-rich, web-hosted e-learning platform for teaching employees and customers.

Any feedback on the wisdom of this plan is most welcome!

Comments

[Jody Baty]

Graham,

This sounds like a wonderful idea. I like idea of the hosted, software as a service model. There's lots of demand for this type of thing.

With respect to the first option, how are you going to safeguard your codebase? I've been approached to have one of our Rails apps self-hosted by a university, but - even with a legal agreement in place - it seems risky to expose months of ruby/rails source code.

[Graham Glass]

Hi Jody,

Licensees will receive full source code for our platform but be required to keep it to themselves.

Cheers,
Graham

[Jody Baty]

Another issue with the self-hosting is the deployment challenges with Rails apps and lack of qualified support personnel. You might want to consider selling an application-in-a-box; that is, the server, application, and managed support.

[Graham Glass]

Hi Jody,

The corporate version will be hosted by my company. The licensed platform will be primarily to other companies who want to offer educational offerings, in which case we're assuming they're technically proficient. That being said, we'll provide them with guidance about how to quickly set up and maintain a scalable version based on our own experience.

Cheers,
Graham