Raghu Pandey, Founder, iBranch.in
Saturday November 21, 2009 , 4 min Read
On the superhighways of the World Wide Web, information flows fluid and fast across colleges and educational institutes, bolstered by iBranch.in, which offers each a chance to start its own intra-institute portal for internal collaboration between students, faculty and administration.Furnished with web applications such as announcements, discussion forums, blogs, document repositories and event calendars, iBranch facilitates the day-to-day activities at educational institutions — the sharing of information, documents, notifications and feedback as well as group interaction — without the need to purchase additional hardware or software.
Though commercial solutions for intra-organisation collaborative portals are available elsewhere, these are prohibitively priced for educational institutions and are aimed at corporate firms. Also, such open-source solutions involve a steep learning curve and high total cost of ownership. Meanwhile, iBranch is directed at the domain of higher education, with the layout and features of its portals designed specially for colleges.
Founded by Raghu Pandey in October 2005, iBranch currently reaches out to around 20,000 students across more than 50 colleges of India. “I was driven by an urge to create something that I believe is useful and required, and not by a need to be my own boss,” he says. Initially making certain mistakes, such as employing people part-time for lesser salaries, iBranch has gone on own to forge a path of success.
Over the past year, iBranch has been ranked number one by Google, Yahoo! and Bing in the category of ‘best intra-college portal’. And for some its clients, iBranch has become critical to their activities. In fact, in August 2008, a management college in Bhopal adopted its services in a large way, scrapping its physical notice board and stopping the distribution of photocopies to students and sending memoranda to its staff physically. “The college went completely online through our services,” Pandey says.
Once, when the iBranch service was down for an entire day, this entrepreneur received a “real testimonial” from the director of the institute, who said, “Raghu, I don’t know all this technical stuff. But I want it resolved by 10 am tomorrow…our notices and lecture plans are stuck with you.” For Pandey, this was milestone.
“Though the users of iBranch are internet-savvy, it was a challenge for us to convince them to adopt our service for their daily collaboration purposes. In our first year, we focused on just eight colleges, developing various online and offline evangelising techniques to induce them to adopt our web-based collaboration,” Pandey says.
The success of iBranch depends on how actively it is used on a day-to-day basis. At present, a majority of its business is through the offline channel, and the company is planning to work on its online direct sales strategy to develop a pan-India presence. “We charge the colleges nominal subscription fees and serve relevant advertisements to the students over their portals. This ensures a high cost-effectiveness of our service from the colleges’ perspective,” Pandey says.
This start-up, which Pandey established with Rs2.5 lakh from his family and space in his father’s office, has been selected for the TiE entrepreneur nurturing programme, which began in Mumbai on August 31. “This gives up the opportunity to undergo high-quality, long-term mentoring,” says Pandey, who has a BE degree in computer science and an MS in networking and telecommunication. The success of his venture is buoyed by a robust web application that has already clocked 19,000 hours of uptime.
The company was invited to partner with the Indian Institute of Management, Indore for an entrepreneurship workshop, which was held on October 25. Also, Pandey frequently gives talks to college students, stressing on the importance of web-based collaboration in their careers. “Though I always manage to keep the students engaged, the audience once gave me a standing ovation. That is a moment I cherish more than all trophies and certificates,” he says.
With his clarity of vision, Pandey is the driving force behind iBranch, which currently has five employees — one technologist, one evangelist and three sales executives — and is based out of Bhopal. What motivates this entrepreneur is the opportunity to meet and receive encouraging words from personalities like Dr Sam Pitroda, chairman of the National Knowledge Commission, and Dr Vijay Bhatkar, the architect of the PARAM series of supercomputers.
YourStory wishes Raghu success as he remains inspired to keep moving along on the journey of entrepreneurship.