Potential boom market
We also spoke to Ray Fleming (pictured below), who's the education marketing manager for Microsoft. He told us about how much schools are using Sharepoint to facilitate not only collaboration between teachers, but things like remote access to resources for students and information access for parents.
In fact, with respect to the last point it seems that the government has given all secondary schools until next year and all primary schools until 2012 to set up systems allowing parents to remotely track, not only how their kids are doing at school, but whether or not they turned up in the first place.
With class registers now being taken electronically, if parents wanted to get really Orwellian about it, they could, in principle, track where their child is all day, in real time.
Fleming also told us about a government scheme that's currently being piloted, in which kids from low-income families get a laptop for free. Currently eligible families get a voucher, which they can redeem from one of the five currently approved suppliers: RM, Stone, XMA, Centerprise and Oldham reseller Positive IT.
The scheme is expected to widen out to the whole market, which could amount to over a million laptops, when the pilot ends this autumn. Hopefully this will also mean a widening of the number of companies that can sell them so there may well be some good opportunities for the channel there.
In fact that was the general vibe we got from this show: that the education sector could well be one of the best places for the channel to be operating in right now. Not only is it relatively recession-proof, with governments, if anything, spending more in their desire to provide Keynesian stimulus to the economy, but it could be on the cusp of a boom.
Technology like Intel's Atom has made providing all children with a laptop a very real possibility. The people we spoke to reckon we're still at the start of the adoption curve, however, so this could be a great time to get into the IT for education market.
