Any business needs capital, good leadership, a good team, great marketing, and aggressive sales to grow and also to build the resilience for challenging times, like the current COVID crisis.
At Excelsoft, we strongly believe in investing in intellectual capital. We are a 20 year old education technology company with a global clientele. We have developed products and services in various areas of education technology. Every one of these segments has competition from other players in the industry. Many times we will know competition, while sometimes it can be surprising and originating from newer businesses.
Competing on product features by filling out RFIs and RFPs with standard checklists does not help bring out the competitive edge we may have. Today, every business has an expanding and evolving digital footprint: active digital marketing efforts and competing to get attention on social media, like I have been trying to do! Vying for attention in the increasingly crowded social media sites, including LinkedIn.
We have been writing about our business, the segments we address, some case studies, etc. But that’s okay. That is a standard template that most companies follow, and so also in the education technology business. We had an internal meeting of our executive board today, and we ‘discovered’ that we are not writing about the intellectual capital in Excelsoft, and we don’t talk about some key aspects of our business in what we publish.
I am particularly proud of the better value proposition we provide:
Firstly, our marketing and sales was still traditionally and mostly about building key relationships and trust with our customer: listening to them carefully, learning from each customer interaction, and our ability to turn it into an organisation-wide learning.
Secondly, it is about building trust and relationships with the partner and customer organisations at various levels: CXO level, program management level, project manager levels, and the team lead levels for execution. This has been a key aspect since we were a startup, and this is a part of Excelsoft’s DNA.
We have invested in intellectual capital in areas that solve customer’s pain points, and it adds a great deal of value too. Therein lies the differentiation. We have top class, deep engineering expertise that is a horizontal function, supporting all the delivery teams.
Top-notch data architects, application architects, test automation team, accessibility team using our own tools for checking accessibility compliance, performance engineering to maximise efficiency, data analytics experts, and data & application security teams. They make us stand out with every customer, as this such an expertise means that we have invested in Intellectual capital over many years, and we are best-in-class.
We also have added value in helping our customers migrate from old platforms and technology to our advanced platforms. More importantly, the complexity sets in when many times we have to integrate with multiple applications that the customer organisation has already invested in. It could be homegrown LMS, third party candidate registration system, educational CRM etc. In most cases, there could be not enough documentation on the legacy systems, compelling us to reverse engineer it, and completely re-architect our product. Many times, we have perfected integration even with systems that are not standards compliant from ‘learning test Interoperability standards’, LRS etc. We work hard to integrate disparate systems, and have delivered it successfully in most such cases. The customers’ delight is that of a complete ready-to-use application. We take on the challenges of optimising their data models and data design, smart architecture fixes, performance testing, and performance tuning.
We manage many of our customers’ cloud deployments monitoring and optimisation. Some of these solutions need a deep insight into cloud services and solutions, and most often, it will be the best way to use them for high performance at optimal prices.
To accomplish is about bringing this conviction to the teams, and enable them to innovate, fast forwarding to build intellectual capital. We are going to talk in depth about each one of these value propositions separately in each article going forward.
When we get tech opportunities that are not easy to solve, it is mostly because we are the company to rely upon. It is different with every customer, and it is NOT an easy approach for us to make such tasks work within the provided time and budget.
