Times are tough, but on our side

Written by

February’s Learning Circuits Blog Big Question asks: What is the impact of the economy on you and your organization? What are you doing as a result?

A quick brief about us:
We are a Learning Solutions company based in Pune, India. Our clients and partners all over the world have been outsourcing their learning solutions development to us for the last 5 years.

What has been the effect?
Well, this crisis has had quite an impact, unlike any other in the last 5 years. As individuals, we did see the 2001 slowdown, but this slump promises to last longer and go deeper.

Clients have certainly slowed down in terms of making decisions. Training budgets are being cut almost everywhere. Everyone wants to wait and see. Unfortunately, what they see every day on TV is not encouraging; and so there’s a downward spiral. The Obama rescue plans are eagerly awaited, as they are expected to have some impact on consumer and corporate confidence.

In more material terms, at Upside Learning, ‘capacity utilization’ has gone down during the current quarter [Jan-Feb’09] and we think it will be the same for March as well. However, we strongly believe that eLearning [and outsourcing of learning solutions] will emerge a winner from this crisis. There’s been a significant increase in the number of large-scale projects under discussion in Q1’09. Web enquiries have increased, and quite a few of our old prospects have restarted ‘discussions’. So we’re optimistic that good times are on their way.

What are we doing about it?
We find this is the best time to review processes and see how we could make them more efficient. We’re focusing even more on training our resources, as well as on innovation in our products and services – game based learning, mLearning, etc. And as Clark suggests in his response to the Big Question, we are also reinventing ourselves a bit with a new look website and this brand new blog.

Some other stuff that we plan to do within the next couple of months:
Get our company bloggers to blog more – use their downtime to socialize with the world.
Get resources on bench to create some of our own product demos – you never get enough time for these in ‘good times’.
Assign each senior member to develop a new area of competence – which they can learn about, research on and train others.
Promote less expensive solutions to our prospects – Rapid Learning Solutions and SaaS LMS [UpsideLMS OnDemand].
Broaden our services to include Catalog Content from MindLeaders.
Set up new partners and resellers for our products in untapped markets.
Manage costs better to keep ourselves in good financial health.
Increase our marketing spend to hopefully engage with more potential customers.

While these are hard times, they present a good opportunity to realign businesses. This way, we’ll be in a position to reap the benefits when the good times come back – which are no more than two quarters away.

Write a Comment

12 Replies to “Times are tough, but on our side”

  1. Joseph Graiff says:

    This is the best thing about Adobe’s Open Screen Project. Build once and deploy on multiple devices. Its a shame some of players will not allow Flash on their devices.

  2. Joseph Graiff says:

    This is the best thing about Adobe’s Open Screen Project. Build once and deploy on multiple devices. Its a shame some of players will not allow Flash on their devices.

  3. Hi Sushil,
    One of the benefits of Nokia phones is the ease of deploying apps to them. You don’t have to go through the Nokia Ovi Store, you can just put your app on a website to download.
    Using PhoneGap it’s really quite easy to create a web-based app and convert it to a Nokia app.
    Cheers,
    Mark

  4. Hi Sushil,
    One of the benefits of Nokia phones is the ease of deploying apps to them. You don’t have to go through the Nokia Ovi Store, you can just put your app on a website to download.
    Using PhoneGap it’s really quite easy to create a web-based app and convert it to a Nokia app.
    Cheers,
    Mark

  5. Ben Bonnet says:

    Sushil,
    This is a great summary of the differences between native and web apps. I share your optimism about web apps for a number of reasons. I really think it’s the easiest path forward and with learning organizations having limited resources, I see most of them adopting a web-heavy approach with their mobile learning. That is not to say that there isn’t room for native apps, especially those that can aggregate web content and those that allow for the learner to create learning content on their device. I am hoping we’ll see exploitation of the technological affordances (camera, accelerometer, GPS, etc.) to create learning rather than for consumption only. Mobile learning offers a two-way learning experience and that is a key differentiator for mobile.

  6. Ben Bonnet says:

    Sushil,
    This is a great summary of the differences between native and web apps. I share your optimism about web apps for a number of reasons. I really think it’s the easiest path forward and with learning organizations having limited resources, I see most of them adopting a web-heavy approach with their mobile learning. That is not to say that there isn’t room for native apps, especially those that can aggregate web content and those that allow for the learner to create learning content on their device. I am hoping we’ll see exploitation of the technological affordances (camera, accelerometer, GPS, etc.) to create learning rather than for consumption only. Mobile learning offers a two-way learning experience and that is a key differentiator for mobile.

  7. I suggest staying away from any platforms that make the “write once & publish everywhere” promise. I can see the lure for beginning developers, those platforms typically offer the worst of both worlds. They don’t maximize the specific functionality of each device the way a true native app would nor are they as universal and easy to maintain as a good HTML5 web app.

  8. I suggest staying away from any platforms that make the “write once & publish everywhere” promise. I can see the lure for beginning developers, those platforms typically offer the worst of both worlds. They don’t maximize the specific functionality of each device the way a true native app would nor are they as universal and easy to maintain as a good HTML5 web app.

  9. […] big question is – Are you building web apps or native one? Sushil Kokate has discussed this here on our blog listing the benefits you get from choosing to go with either of […]

  10. […] big question is – Are you building web apps or native one? Sushil Kokate has discussed this here on our blog listing the benefits you get from choosing to go with either of […]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

GET INSIGHTS AND LEARNING DELIGHTS STRAIGHT TO YOUR INBOX, SUBSCRIBE TO UPSIDE LEARNING BLOG.

    Enter Your Email

    Published on

    Topic:

    Don't forget to share this post!

    Achievements of Upside Learning Solutions

    WANT TO FIND OUT HOW OUR SOLUTIONS CAN IMPACT
    YOUR ORGANISATION?
    CLICK HERE TO GET IN TOUCH