E-learning start-up plans big

24*7 Learning, a small e-learning service provider, does not plan on remaining small for long.

The company, which closed last year with Rs 1.5 crore in revenues, plans to finish this fiscal with Rs 3 crore and Anil Chikkara, founder and CEO of the company predicts that they will be growing by another 100 per cent the next year too.

"The potential for e-learning solutions in India is huge. Five years back, when we started out, we were selling the idea of e-learning. Now everybody knows what e-learning consists of and we have truly started selling our services only two years back," says Chikkara.

Starting with a small capital, the organisation focussed on developing its own learning management system (LMS) product, LearnTrak. (LMS is the basic platform on which all e-learning solutions need to run.) The company also made a strategic decision to target corporates in the first phase of its growth.

Following this goal, it partnered with content providers abroad to host nearly 3,000 courses on its platform, which it offered to clients like Wipro Technologies, Airtel and Touchtel. These courses cover a wide range of areas, both for specific domains like IT, BPO, BFSI and telecom, as well as general communication courses.

The organisation's revenue model so far has been to offer consulting and implementation services to clients and get the solution working, based on the courses and number of users that needs to be connected.

"Usually a customer will want to start small and then grow big. But whether it is a small base or a big one, the implementation is the same. Therefore, while the cost in the initial phase might be high, when the customer comes back to add more users, our costs dip. Therefore, we manage to make huge profit margins on our solution," says Chikkara.

"IT firms contribute 40 per cent of our revenues at the moment. But we are also finding a lot of traction with traditional companies. Good examples of this will be the Aditya Birla group and the Murugappa group, both of whom are our clients. The biggest growth in the next few years will happen in these sectors," says Chikkara.

He predicts that much opportunity lies untapped in the BPO segment for which the company plans to launch a voice and accent training product soon. They are also in conversation with B rung MBA colleges to implement their solution for some of the MBA courses.

Further, the company wants to move to managed services model of operations, wherein it will take care of the back end technical set up for clients, with them having to bother only about the front end.

"E-learning is ideal when it is complemented by classroom training. I believe that the mistake made when e-learning was introduced was that it was touted as a method that would replace classrooms. That is not true. Classrooms provide necessary interaction and e-learning is more effective when combined with it," says Chikkara.