Executive Summary
HRC3 is one of the few companies offering e2e IT services (education to education). HRC3 offers an array of product and services which can take care of all the IT needs of any educational institute. HRC3 offers solutions from providing hardware and software to cloud based hosting and access control services. HRC3 has deep understanding and knowledge of the education industry and its changing IT needs. HRC3also takes pride in its green data center that runs on geo-thermal and hydro-electric fuels and thereby it contributes to the reduction of carbon emission. It also offers a long term fixed cost pricing model for its service which many of its competitors cannot provide owing to increasing energy price. With its array of products and services and deep knowledge in education industry HRC3 probably will do better in the educational IT sector than most of the other players in the industry.
Introduction
HRC3 is an organization that provides world-class IT solutions to the education sector. Keeping in with the changing educational environment, the company aspires to address all the IT challenges enveloping the education sector by making partnership with some of the leading ICT enterprises so that it can offer its services at competitive pricing. The objectives of the company are aligned towards fulfilling its mission of improving "student learning outcomes by using technologies that work" (HRC3). The company provides a good many solutions to the education sector including cloud services, FF&E solutions, E-learning, access control system, server monitoring services, free school meals and many more. The core competency of the company lays in its use of renewable energy resources to run its data center in Iceland. This essay will discuss about HRC3 and its product offerings in the educational IT infrastructure domain touching upon the target audience of the organization for its products and the competitive advantages of the company in the educational IT infrastructure market.
Company Profile
Founded by Hertford Regional College in the year 2011, HRC3 aims at providing world-class IT services for education sector. The organization is education-oriented, understands the changing needs of technology for the education sector and makes effort to fulfill those needs amidst the all the constraints of government funding and the pressure of keeping up high educational standard with reduced budgets. HRC3 is a consortium of educationalists who in partnership with the best commercial organizations of the ICT industry provide superior quality cost effective reliable and novel IT solutions to the education sector. The company is the first education selling to education (e2e) service provider in the UK. The company is specialized in project management, consultancy, procurement, implementation and integration to offer first-class IT solutions for schools, colleges and universities all over the UK. HRC3 takes pride in serving reputed clients like Hertfordshire College of Technology, Hall School Wimbeldon, Redbridge College, St Peter's R.C. Primary School, Kidderminster College, Lincoln College and Avanti House.
Product Offerings
HRC3 offers a range of services for the education sector starting from new builds or refurbs, e-learning services to cloud services combined with green technology, school system, access control systems and visual learning technologies. HRC3 offers a comprehensive outsourced Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) service out of its datacenter based in Iceland to help the institutes which have implemented VLE. Taking into consideration the potential energy crunch in future, the organization operates on renewable energy resources taking pride in its Icelandic data center which runs on geo-thermal and hydro-electric fuels. Since data loss is the biggest challenge of information technology, HRC3's cloud service offers solutions that cover business continuity strategy and planning, disaster recovery planning and solution implementation to give protection to the education sector against the loss of valuable IT assets. Its cloud service offerings also include cost effective simplified application migration services, proof of concepts, hosted virtual desktop infrastructure and cloud backup services. The company's furniture, fixing and equipment (FF&E) services ensure providing a better classroom environment to support teaching and learning. In partnership with Synel the company offers access control system including the cutting-edge face recognition system that replaces the use of badges and cards, enrolling fingerprints with the help of USB optical mouse and forge-proof and durable biometric smart cards. Thus the company ensures to prevent unauthorized access, theft and vandalism and personal violence in the school premises. Further in partnership with the leading business partners like Microsoft, IBM and HP the company provides software and hardware devices at competitive price.
Target Audience and Challenges
HRC3 is in the business of providing IT solutions to schools, colleges and universities. It is the first and one of the very few companies offering only e2e service. HRC3 is a comprehensive education infrastructure service provider specializing in IT infrastructure and cloud based product offerings for schools and colleges. The current target audience for the company is the schools and colleges of UK but it has plans to expand its operation in future to other countries.
There are a number of challenges for the company in this field. Most of the educational institutions manage their own IT infrastructure with an in-house IT team maintained by the school or college. Outsourcing is not an option for many institutions as they do not feel secure about their data and network managed by a third party vendor. In some cases some of the colleges or universities have outsourced their IT systems to the industry leaders reputed for managing the IT infrastructure. This way those institutions do not need to keep an overhead of IT staff or infrastructure. HRC3 is facing challenges in both the above scenarios. In case of schools and colleges who are not willing to outsource, it is be hard to convince them to outsource the IT operation to HRC3. For colleges and universities which already have outsourced their infrastructure to some vendors, it is even more challenging for the company to convert those institutes from their current vendor to HRC3. HRC3 needs to provide clear and quantifiable benefits to the institutes to convince them. Although the educational market does not have many players in the e2e business, still it is not easy for HRC3 to penetrate into this segment.
How the Products Work in the Current Academic Environment
In the last two decades due to the evolution of internet and information technology lot of changes have taken place in the education sector. Education without the help of IT is becoming impossibility in recent times. With the help of IT technologies the effectiveness of learning and the reach of the colleges and universities have achieved new highs. In a recent survey it was observed that more than 94% of the college and university going students use some kind of mobile devices. Mobile devices in current times can do many things apart from just calling. Mobile devices are now often used to access libraries and read books, journals and articles. Mobile devices are also used to connect to a virtual classroom. With the advancement of technology it is now the need of the hour to have an up to date IT infrastructure up and running in almost all educational institutions. Not every educational institution has expertise or budget to maintain and run a sophisticated IT system. HRC3 offers the exact solutions any educational institute will require to enhance its educational and learning process simultaneously maintaining the data confidentiality.
Although HRC3 actually offers an array of products but its product offerings can be divided into three main categories. HRC3 categorizes its product offerings into three broad purchasing model bundles. Ad-Hoc IT purchases are online purchase of mainly IT products from the online HRC3 shop. This may be costly for the institutes but when the decision is taken at the last moment then there is no other option but to go for this. With this option HRC3 offers guaranteed cost+3% model to the buyers. Bulk of the project based fixed price purchase gives less priced products and services when multiple items are bundled into one project. HRC3 offers end to end solution in such projects and offers special rate depending on the size of the project. Educational institutes which plan well in advance about their IT system and know what exactly they are looking for will be benefitted if this option is chosen. The purchase of services will help educational institutes outsource all its data storage, server applications, and hosting, virtual telephony and infrastructure services to HRC3. All services in this case are tailored to the specific needs of the institutes based on their budget.
How to Implement the Current Business Model
HRC3 offers an array of products dealing with the IT infrastructure for an educational institute. HRC3 offers building new infrastructure, equipment, e-learning facilities, IT infrastructure supply, managed services, cloud services, school systems, access control systems and visual learning technologies solutions. This is nothing but almost exhaustive IT infrastructure solutions an educational institute will require.
HRC3 can have a three step approach for its products to work in the market. Firstly, HRC3 can reach the schools and colleges with its wide-ranging list of products and offer them IT consulting and strategy roadmap at minimal cost. This will provide the company an opportunity to understand the educational institute and its requirements better and the company will get a chance to showcase its product capability. As HRC3 was born out of an educational background, the years of industry expertise will help the company provide a better IT roadmap for any educational institution than general consultants. Secondly, once the consulting is done the company can recommend some action plan for the educational institute to improve its IT infrastructure. HRC3 can actually help an educational institute build, fix and redesign its IT system. Thirdly, once the build phase is over then HRC3 can approach the educational institutes with its array of IT support service products to continue serving them at a low cost and high efficiency.
The approach above can be applied to any new institute willing to implement a new IT facility or planning to overhaul its existing facility. The company can directly approach with its product offerings to other educational institutes depending on what they want.
Competitive Advantage
HRC3 has many advantages over its competitors. The first and foremost being, it is the only player providing e2e solutions in the UK. HRC3 is the only company which offers IT educational solution for colleges, schools and universities exclusively. HRC3 is the only company which issues from an educational institute and has the required knowledge and expertise of the educational industry. HRC3 being formed by Harford Regional College has deep knowledge of the IT needs and demands of the industry.
HRC3 offers a wide-ranging list of products and services ranging from the design of an IT infrastructure for an educational institute to managing a cloud based system from an offsite location. This is probably the only organization in this industry with the solution to all the IT infrastructure related needs and demands of an educational institute at its disposal. Some of its industry competitors may offer some services, like hardware or software, better than HRC3 but overall they cannot compete in offering such a vast range of solutions offered by HRC3.
HRC3 like many other industry players in infrastructure hosting and support services offers a cost plus percentage model. HRC3 typically offers a cost+3% model. The cost in such cases mainly comes from the energy cost of running the data centers. Energy cost for most of the companies that use non-renewable sources of energy goes up by almost 20% every year and that trend continues for many more years to come. Therefore, the services provided by these companies will definitely be more expensive than HRC3 because HRC3 relies completely on renewable energy resources. Its data center located in Iceland is powered by geothermal and hydro-electric fuels. HRC3 maintains a long term energy price contract with the government of Iceland and hence the cost of energy for HRC3 will not shoot up in future. That is why HRC3can guarantee stable energy cost for the educational institutes for short term future.
HRC3 also provides IT infrastructure support using green energy solutions. Many of the current educational institutes have green energy norms in place. Those institutes are always on the lookout for reducing the carbon footprint. HRC3 uses geothermal and hydro-electric energy to power its data center in Iceland which is one of the best green data centers in the whole world. Using HRC3 for cloud based services which are operated from the Icelandic data center will help in the reduction of the carbon footprint for colleges and academies.
Finally HRC3 has the maximum experience of implementing IT infrastructure in UK educational institutes and so it is by far the most experienced organization in the field. It has already implemented IT solutions in more than 24 institutes in UK.
Conclusion
HRC3 is an organization formed by Hartford Regional College. Although it is a part of Harford Regional College but it operates independently and offers an array of IT infrastructure solutions for the educational institutes. As the company comes from the educational background, it has deep knowledge and expertise about the IT needs and demands of the educational institutions. This in-depth industry knowledge and expertise helped HRC3 develop an all-encompassing product and services portfolio to fulfill the IT needs of educational institutes. Currently not many institutes manage their IT infrastructure very efficiently but with the technological advancement in recent years it is absolutely necessary for all educational facilities to upgrade its IT infrastructure. HRC3 assists the institutes in the implementation and maintenance of IT infrastructure in a green and cost effective way. There are few advantages of HRC3 over its competitors. The company can offer long term fixed cost contracts to institutes as it has a long term energy contract with the Iceland government for its data center. It also can help educational institutes reduce the carbon footprint as HRC3 data center is one of the most green energy data centers in the world. Finally HRC3 is a one stop shop for all the IT needs of educational institutes. Educational organizations only need to think about improving the educational needs and HRC3 can take care of its IT infrastructure.
Reference
HRC3: Education 2 Education Platform. Retrieved on 20th August 2013 from <http://www.hrc3.org.uk/>
