iBranch.in > Advantage iBranch

Cost Advantage -
Great benefits in setup & running costs

Having your official intra-college portal on iBranch.in has tremendous cost advantages over developing and/or hosting your own portal solution. Please see the box “The Backend” to understand the infrastructure and manpower resources needed for running an official intra-college portal. Following is a table showing the cost distribution across four critical areas:

Where are the costs?
5% - 20% Initial Infrastructure	5% - 15% Deployment Personnel	5% - 15% Ongoing Infrastructure	50% - 85% Ongoing Personnel
Hardware	Design	Hardware Repair / Replace	Scheduled Maintenance
Software	Configure & Integrate	Network	Unscheduled Maintenance
Security	Test & Tune	Security	Outage Response
Monitoring/ Management Tools	Ancillary Upgrades	Bandwidth	System Monitoring
Ancillary Upgrades	Launch	Software Maintenance & Upgrades	End User Service & Support
Facilities	IT staff Training	Redundant Systems	End User Training Staff Training
	End User Training & Awareness	Capacity Adds	Admin., Reporting & Cost Allocation
		Add on Feature Sets	Planning, Engineering, Testing
		Monitoring/ Management Tools	Deployment of Upgrades and Add-ons
		Facilities	Security Monitoring
		Other (help desk etc.)	Marketing Awareness & Adoption

Original source: IDC. Direct source: White paper from WebEx – [pdf] “On-demand Vs. On-premise collaboration”.

The initial infrastructure with an entry-level server and free open source software would cost more than Rs.100,000 and it would incur a recurring cost of more than Rs. 25,000 per year for power and internet connectivity (excluding maintenance costs). This assumes that your IT department has reserve manpower to do things mentioned in the second and fourth column of the above table, which is often difficult. Even if a single technical person is deployed to administer the portal setup, the effective recurring costs shoot beyond Rs.100,000 per year!

On www.ibranch.in, subscription prices for an iBranch start at Rs.2490 per month.! (see subscription plans) So how do we provide this service at such low prices? The infrastructure costs get shared among various clients. Operational costs per portal, which are the highest among all costs, are recovered through sponsorships and ads (limited and strictly relevant advertising).

Training Advantage -
Ensuring proper utilization of service

'Evangelizing' is one of the most important activities among our client colleges, and the sole purpose of evangelizing is to help the client college to adopt the culture of web-based collaboration. It involves specially designed modules for students, teachers and management. Just as we specialize in the technology of intra-college portals, we also specialize in implementing it within a college. Apart from free & continuous online training, we offer following two evangelizing programs for colleges:

- JumpStart Program
- Collaboration Maturity Program

JumpStart Program is a fast-track module to quickly train the students and teachers for web based collaboration. Its like a crash course for giving them tips & motivation on 'why & when to use iBranch' and 'how to make the best use of their intra college portal'.

Collaboration Maturity Program is an advanced in-depth module to make an organization 'collaboratively mature'. A college which has attained collaboration maturity can get lot of preference and appreciation from the industry.

iBranch Network Advantage -
Exposure to industry

We are continuously working towards expanding our Corporate & Industry network, and we allow them to get directly connected on a long-term basis with our client colleges for Knowledge Sharing, Projects and Placements. This ensures that the students of our client colleges get quality & long-term exposure to the corporate domain, making them industry ready.