iBranch software

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%InitialInfrastructure 5% - 15%DeploymentPersonnel 5% - 15%OngoingInfrastructure 50% - 85%OngoingPersonnel 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 ProgramJumpStart Program is a fast-track module to quickly train the students and teachers for web based collaboration. Its like a crash course for giving then 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.

Cost Advantage - Great benefits in setup & running costs