Edu-leaders

Every new academic year is marked by the placing of orders for laptops and PCs for incoming students. Armed with budgets and requirements campuses around the country look for deals as vendors try to pitch for more and more business. How prepared is your institution for what has nearly become an annual ritual? Is your research sufficient; and your vendor selection process adequate? Is the configuration you’ve chosen suitable for your needs and budget; or could you have got more? We survey the landscape and seek answers to some of these questions.

Survey the Market
“Having laptops has made the classroom environment more engaging and – with immediate access to the Internet – more real-time,” says Professor Prasoon Majumdar, dean – academics, Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM). “Today, technology is the bedrock for facilitating any management initiative; so, strong integration of technology into our courses was felt to be compulsory. Laptops and Wi-Fi networking became integral to that,” he adds. Like IIPM, most higher education institutes have today made a definitive shift towards bulk purchases.

The market today offers a wide range of laptops and desktops, to meet all requirements and budgets. At the lowest end are Netbooks (Internet + notebooks) and Nettops (Internet + desktops), which are small-sized, cost-effective computers, primarily used for accessing the Internet. Their computing power, memory, and storage capacity are designed for this specific usage. While you can do basic tasks like word processing on these devices, running more than one application – for instance, a word processor and the Internet browser— at the same time, could result in slow performance.

Laptops are generally of two kinds— consumer and business. Consumer laptops are designed for use at home. They are heavier, are available in snazzy designs and have processing power and other specifications customised for applications such as gaming. Business laptops, on the other hand, are relatively lightweight and rugged in design. They are designed for heavy use and may have additional security features to protect data and the hard drive.

Anand Karapurkar, director and founder of Infobahn Technologies, whose focus is the education segment, has this to say on choosing between laptops and Netbooks. “Students use laptops for six to seven hours a day and travel with it in crowded buses and trains. So, the laptop has to be rugged and lightweight hence business laptops designed for rugged use are ideal for them.

Consumer laptops, could end up with cracked screens if used roughly. Netbooks are not recommended for students, since they are pure Internet browsing devices and are more suited for sales-force automation.”

Also available in the market are tablet PCs, with slate-like or book-like displays that enable users to write on the screen with a stylus to input text. While these are very lightweight, and well suited for users on the go they can also be prohibitively expensive for most institutions.

When it comes to desktops, there isn’t much difference between consumer and business models, as far as basic configuration is concerned. Desktops with specialized configurations and applications are available for specific applications, such as CAD/CAM or graphics-intensive work. In desktops, you also have the choice of opting for branded desktops or assembled models; and also, whether you’d want to use licensed, proprietary software like Microsoft Windows (which can be expensive), or open source (more cost-effective and highly customisable) software such as Linux.

At IIT Bombay (IIT B), for instance, assembled desktops and open source software rule the day. Professor Abhay Karandikar, head – computer Centre and Professor, Department of Electrical Engineering, says that assembled machines are “easy to upgrade, and any problems are easy to fix.” IIT B uses machines of four to six standard configurations, which, according to Karandikar, “are sufficient for our requirements, and can be replaced or upgraded after three to four years.” The machines in the institute run Linux, and “95 per cent of the applications we run are open source. Our mail server, proxy server, and even ERP are open-source applications. We find that it is much easier to provide support and service,” Karandikar adds.

Karapurkar explains that while assembled desktops do have the advantage of “lower cost and faster delivery, support for them is too dependent on the assembler, who is typically not backed by a good, established company.” He adds that low product quality is another risk with assembled desktops. So, unless the institution has an experienced in-house technical group, assembled machines can become a bane rather than a boon.

Check Requirements
Most low-end or mid-range laptops today are equipped with dual-core processors – this means that there are two processors within one chip. An Intel or AMD dual-core processor, with a speed of about 2 GHz, is adequate for tasks such as word processing, e-mail, Internet browsing, using spreadsheets or presentation software, watching movies, and even working with video or image files. Faster CPU speeds are required if the user is involved in intensive multimedia work or high-end gaming. For this, you could also consider quad processors (four processors in one chip).

As important as the processor speed, is the RAM (random access memory); because together, they determine system performance. For the common tasks about 2 GB RAM is sufficient. More RAM is required for intensive multimedia or engineering work.

Hard disk size is important, because the hard disk stores all the data – operating system, programs, drivers, and user-generated data. Today, 160 GB is often the default size for hard disks in laptops, which is sufficient for most purposes. For more intensive engineering, graphics, or multimedia work, 250 GB or larger hard disks may be needed.

When it comes to screen size, a 14-inch screen is sufficient. Most laptops today come with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, and a DVD/RW or similar drive to watch and create DVDs and CDs. Usually, a new laptop would have an operating system (Microsoft Windows Vista is the default for most vendors) and other productivity software, such as Microsoft Office. This is the basic minimum you should settle for.

Laptops bundled with goodies like a webcam, are not essential as Webcam usage not only hogs network bandwidth, but can also pose security issues. Low-end or mid-range laptops can meet the requirements of most management and engineering institutes, which are among the biggest customers of laptops. “Management students aren’t doing rocket science on their laptops. They use it mainly to run Office software, project management software, our Web-based ERP and some statistical tools,” observes Professor Basav Roychoudhury, IT head at IIM Shillong.

Architecture, design and animation and some engineering courses require high-end machines with advanced graphics and processing capabilities. Colleges that offer these courses, therefore, need to invest accordingly. Karapurkar says that such institutions need the workstations, but due to budget constraints, often settle for laptops with lower graphics capabilities. “With bulk deals, they are able to get a decent configuration in laptops at Rs 30,000 to 35,000. Though laptops are slower in rendering, etc, they don’t mind that during their learning days,” he explains.

Neeraj Gupta, general manager at Dell states, “Each course type would need a specific configuration, basis the applications they plan to run. Our solutions experts assess the requirement of these institutes and will propose the best possible configuration. We believe that there is no standard solution; and would rather give our customer the choice of building their own product, so that they get the best value for money.”

Plan and Negotiate
The first step is to be aware about the options available in the market. Majumdar states that market intelligence is a critical part of the buying process. At IIPM, the tech support department researches vendors and the products and services they offer. It also collects feedback from students on the performance of the existing vendor. Based on this, it prepares a feature-price-service matrix, and submits a report to the vendor engagement committee. This committee then meets vendors, gathers more information through market intelligence, and then the final call is taken by the dean – administration. IIPM currently has a budget of Rs 100 to 120 million to buy laptops for its 4,000-odd students.

In contrast, at the IIMs, students spearhead the process of buying laptops. “There is an IT committee of students in each IIM. These committees get together and negotiate with vendors at the national level. Because the numbers are huge, they get good bulk deals,” says Roychoudhury. For the institute’s own usage of IT products, a tender process is followed. “We are very price-sensitive – if we find that all the parties during a tender have quoted prices higher than the market prices, we even scrap the tender and start afresh,” he adds.

Besides considering configuration and price colleges should also look for features that provide enhanced security and easier manageability. Support and after-sales commitment is a critical area and should be a part of the negotiation. For instance when Prin. L.N. Welingkar Institute of Management Development and Research got Infobahn to provide laptops five years ago it also got a commitment from Infobahn to creates a service help desk within the campus, where a service engineer would be available on all working days.

Sumanta Mukherjee, lead PC analyst, IDC India feels that educational institutions should also focus on getting an IT infrastructure that has multi-user facilities and multi-year software licensing to reduce total cost of ownership.

Moreover, as Professor M.P. Kapoor, founding vice chancellor, NIIT University, Neemrana points out, there are also other points to ponder like, “Can students access the course material and recorded lectures from any location, within and outside the campus? Can they access these on a variety of portable devices (PDAs, netbooks and notebooks)? What is the uptime and availability of desktops already there in the campus?” While buying desktops and laptops is routine now, it is definitely not a small decision. The machines you buy have to be useful, cost-effective, and should empower students to get more from their course curriculum.

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