With a vision to defining the future of education through innovative EduTech solutions Unni Krishnan Koroth co-founded the Foradian Technologies. He talks to Elets News Network (ENN) about Foradian’s vision, journey, solutions, initiatives, unique proposition, future plans and much more.
What is the vision of Foradian Technologies?
Foradian builds educational software to simplify the life of institution administrators and teachers, so that they can focus on the most important thing: educating the children. We are bridging the digital divide in education by offering Fedena Core as open source and selling premium product and services at affordable pricing.
With many players in the EduTech space, what is different about Foradian Technologies?
The EduTech space is an unorganised market with lot of noise. We are differentiating on three things:
- Quality of product, quality of code and user experience;
- Delivery mechanism and automating sales and after sales through a pure SaaS strategy;
- Long-term strategy – We built Foradian to the present level with minimum resources by believing in a long-term strategy. We will be here for the next 10+ years. So we are not in a rush.
How do the solutions offered by Foradian simplify the life of institution administrators and teachers?
Our product Fedena provides userfriendly dashboards with login access for teachers, non-teaching staff, students, parents and management personnel of an institution. The various modules available in Fedena facilitate all the processes of an institution, from admission of new students to generating transfer certificates when students complete their studies.
Fedena has modules to manage Timetable, Attendance, Examinations, Gradebooks, Campus News, Hostel, Library, Transportation, School Calendar, Events and much more. It has a full-fledged Human Resource Module to manage the payroll and employee pay slips. The Finance Module helps you to plan and allot different fee structures to
students.
Fedena is also an excellent collaboration tool having Task, Discussion, Poll, Blog and Video conference plug-ins. There is an internal messaging system within Fedena, but you can also integrate it with external communication tools like email and texting. To find out more, one can try the free demo available at www.fedena.com.
Fedena: All-in-one Software to Manage Schools and Colleges
Fedena has everything an institution will ever need – grade books, parent-teacher collaboration, attendance, fee management and 50+ feature rich modules. This software can automate everything, generate insightful reports, make better & faster decisions. Used in 200+ countries, it is also available in Spanish, French and 18 other languages.
One of our earliest implementations of Fedena Project ‘Sampoorna’ is still one of the biggest and successful implementations of Student Information System on eGOV level. Last week, we released Fedena 3.5 with lot of new enhancements.
Foradian Technologies, being the start up at that time, was behind creating ‘The Rupee Foradian’ font. How is the journey since then? What are the achievements in terms of innovation?
We had a really long, challenging and satisfying journey till now. We were listed in Deloitte Fastest Growing 50 Technology Companies of India for the past two years. We secured an angel investment of $2 million from William Bissell, MD of FabIndia. One of our earliest implementations of Fedena Project ‘Sampoorna’ is still one of the biggest and successful implementations of Student Information System on eGov level. Last week, we released Fedena 3.5 with lots of new enhancements. We are excited about what lies ahead of us.
What are the future plans of your company? Are you planning to launch any new products?
Other than Fedena, we have launched Unity — a simple learning management platform. We don’t have plans for any other products at the moment. We are learning and improving our existing products and services, based on the feedback we receive from our customers.
How technological transformations and innovative learning tools can change the education landscape in India in the coming decade?
Technology will work as a catalyst in transforming education landscape of India as well as world. One of the biggest trends is more and more millennials (born after 1980s) are coming to the leadership, administration and teaching roles of educational institutions. This is going to be a game changer. With the help of different innovative tools, the leadership will transform the way kids learn and teachers teach. Another mega trend is the millennials becoming parents and sending their kids to school. These parents are also tech-savvy and will play a key role in achieving this vision.
Being the leader of the company, what are your professional achievements and priorities you set for the future?
Our key priority is to keep doing things that are working for us. Over a period of time, we have established some really good organisational habits, like constantly releasing new versions of Fedena based on customers feedback, and balancing the need for customisation with the challenges of scale. We have a strong focus on running a business that is proi table and growing in revenue year-after-year. Majority of our customers are from outside India. So we will continue our focus on international markets.
