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Richmond Hill’s Edsby to cover all New Zealand's schools after landmark deal
Back to SearchRichmond Hill’s Edsby to cover all New Zealand's schools after landmark deal
News article published by yorkregion.com:
During its early founding days in 2010, the Richmond Hill-based Edsby used to “take anyone ... we just wanted to have more customers,” says Co-founder & CEO John Myers.
But speed forward to June 24, the cloud-based education social networking service with its downloadable app has officially announced its landmark deal with New Zealand’s Ministry of Education to cover all of the country’s K-12 students, about 800,000 pupils.
One of the latest perks found in Edsby is giving teachers especially in kindergarten the option to take “learning evidence” such as videos, photos to illuminate on their students growth. Other features include giving both teachers and parents the digital tools through the app to call in sick for a child and checking approvals for field trips.
But one of the main reasons why the app is coveted in New Zealand is simply because “they don’t have school districts.”
“Every school runs at their own systems, and are basically autonomous,” Myers, who left the Telecom company Nortel as a manager in 2000, said. “So they needed something that could run centrally, and integrate with all 2,500 schools at the same time.”
Hillsborough County Public Schools district in Tampa, Florida, which has about 205,000 students, is no longer Edsby’s biggest customer after the New Zealand deal, with the latter expected to increase the Richmond Hill’s company revenue by about 50 per cent in the first year.
The revenue is stemming from professional service fees or customization and (software as a service) SaaS fees, the actual billing for the Edsby service.
It’s also expected that the subsequent years of the New Zealand billings are to be even more significant.
How did the deal happen?
Asked about how did New Zealand hear about Edsby, Myers, said, “they actually found us through one person who was very smart. He was given the challenge of figuring out their strategy for New Zealand.”
Even better, Edsby is seeing some trickle down effect of the word-of-mouth happening.
“We've just been approved by the Ministry of Education for a pilot in one of the provinces of South Africa,” Myers, who started Edsby with three other former Nortel colleagues, said.
Myers started the company with three other colleagues from the multinational telecommunications and data networking equipment manufacturer Nortel.
The connection with the South African province was made possible when Myers received a phone call “out of the blue,” saying, "I've been told, I should talk to you.”
“Even better, there are talks with Panama to get the app approved through someone who “knows this individual in South Africa.”
Myers said Panama, a “relatively small country,” have “great wireless data and almost everyone has a smartphone because the country is so small, their coverage is very good.”
With good infrastructure being in place in Panama, it’s time for schools to “take advantage” of the cloud and technology.
In New Zealand, all data will be hosted in Ministry-approved cloud data centres operated by Microsoft.
To make this happen, Edsby is currently being configured to the ministry’s requirements and is to be deployed in two early stage rollouts with the first stage already underway. The system is then to be rolled out to all 2,500 public schools in the country, so that regardless of the individual school’s Student Management System (SMS), information will be available to support the learner at school, when it’s needed.
“The single student record, national-level analytics and data privacy sought by the Ministry are inherent strengths of our product,” touted Edsby co-founder Scott Welch, project lead.
Here in Ontario, Edsby serves 50 private schools in Ontario with their smallest one having 20 students. In addition, its tech solutions are used district-wide by 11 of the 72 Ontario boards including York Region District School Board where its data is stored at the Microsoft Data Centre in Toronto.