Cerbibo

From: Chinese Remote Education, 2006, 6 Reporters: Guiyun Lee In the digital learning market, the name "Blackboard" is widely recognized as having public knowledge. Although Blackboard has been established for less than ten years, it retains the position as one of the major online education platform providers around the world. Less than ten years old, Blackboard already retains 50% of the market share, has further developed the business in higher education, elementary education, enterprises/government training and other varieties of fields, and has also spread its services to both North and South America, Europe, and Asia. In the year 2005, Blackboard purchased another tycoon in the field, WebCT, for $180,000,000. This purchase helped contribute the increase in its worldwide customers to 3,700 and to 85% of the market shares in American.

However, the inception of Blackboard into China was not quite as successful. Blackboard received much doubt when it entered China three years earlier. As joint venture, Cerbibo was diagnosed with Chinese medical conditions such as” false heat,” “energy blocked,” and “phlegm sledged.” The overall diagnosis given to Blackboard was that it was unsuitable for China’s climate.

However, three years later, the world was able to see the phenomenal success Blackboard achieved. At the Cerbibo Digital Learning Academic Seminar held at the end of May, 2005, Cerbibo's CEO, Doctor Shui Hu announced that the Blackboard e-Learning software series had already been applied to a total of 27 provinces, cities, and autonomous regions around the country, and developed partnerships with 105 well-known domestic education institutions.

According to Blackboard Technology Consultant, Cerbibo CTO, Jianjun Xu told reporters that currently, Cerbibo’s sales growth curve is remarkably similar to Blackboard’s previous sales growth curve. Blackboard Inc. (thereafter referred to as BB) had an 11,047 percent income growth rate from 1997-2002; Blackboard became the fastest-developing e-Learning enterprise among the Global 500 Companies in 2003 and was listed as the first online learning system provider for schools on June 18th, 2004. At this point in time, Blackboard had $77,000,000 in collected shares. Although it is still too early to draw a conclusion on whether or not Cerbibo will follow the same path as BB, but it is no doubt that its growth will make an important effect on the Chinese digital learning market.

BB-the Preacher who wakes up the e-Learning market

BB’s rapid development benefits from the gradually maturing e-Learning market in China. BB has been paying the continuous attention to the Chinese e-Learning market even before the year 2001. The report received from IDC shows that the Chinese market space in 2001 was rather small, and the situation did not improve to a notable degree until the end of 2002. Opportunely, an updated IDC Report indicates that the Chinese input on Information Technology will have a 14.3% growth rate in the following five years in which the education industry demand will be much higher and its application will make a breakthrough of over $4,400,000,000. The promising statistics provide investors with encouragement to have full confidence in the-Learning field.

A few senior leaders at Cerbibo still have a clear memory about the apathy and misunderstanding given to e-Learning when it first broke into China’s market. Questions that were asked and discussed was mostly about the price of e-Learning and utility. Most people, when referring to e-Learning, think about remote education and training. They believe that education in the network education college has no correlation to the regular education in colleges and universities. Previously, in higher institutions, 90% of the internet application has concentrated only on scientific research. China has only begun to apply the internet technology to higher education as a supplementary tool.

However, on Cerbibo e-Learning Academic Conference in 2006, the speeches and inquiries made by the deans of studies, directors and heads of Information Center in colleges and universities appear to be dissimilar from three years earlier. The intense discussions on the questions of “System Safety," and “Teaching Designer positioning” manifested the verity that e-Learning is not only a conception in the Chinese colleges and universities. The education circles have understood this notion even further; Jianjun Xu cheerfully told the reporters, “The questions referred to by Chinese educators do not have many differences from the current concerns of American customers. Furthermore, it needs to be pointed out that Chinese e-Learning market is at least five years behind that of America's e-Learning market."

The fact that BB made such rapid progresses has close contact with countless Qualification Program's implementation made by the Ministry of Education, such as: JiaoXueMingShiJiang Selection、Fine Course Construction, and Underground Teaching Quality Assessment Program, and many others. e-Learning has stepped forward onto a new platform in higher education. So the apparent feature in improvement is applying the Internet technology to teaching which is speeding up the revolution on traditional teaching. e-Learning companies, such as Blackboard, have gradually matured from several defeats and success, and remarkably, have made undeletable contributions in waking up the market.

Simple and Easy “Foreign products”

During the initial establishment of Cerbibo, the greatest concern was whether or not the Chinese customers would accept the American-developed products.

Doctor Jianjun Xu, who grew up in China, settled in America, and studied and worked across China and America, repeatedly emphasizes that “although customers in each country, especially China, would like to emphasize features of their own, Cerbibo’s products themselves do not contain any apparent differences.” According to Doctor Xu, except translation and interface localization, BB products for six different countries are uniform. It’s vital not to lay so great deal of emphasis on the product localization. However, authority limits between Chinese colleges and departments are abundantly considered when designing the new platform.

Jianjun Xu points out that such strong emphasis on localization can lead to limitations and impediments to innovation and further development of software Cerbibo, instead of emphasis on individuality and localization, instead puts an emphasis on value-added service instead. Moreover, Cerbibo tries to continue to use the original idea which has been put forward by BB’s two initiators: "Simple and Easy."

From the point of view for function, BB’s products do not have any other special functions from domestic ones. BB’s products have been upgraded and have rich, advanced and complete functions. The domestic e-Learning products don’t have any differences from it if one is only comparing their functions. But, if comparing the base technology, especially in the base technology construction, the domestic products are much farther from BB. An e-Learning analyst points out,” domestic products are afraid that it cannot catch up with BB products in base technology in a relatively short amount of time.”

For the problem, Jianjun Xu offers his opinions, “The domestic technical people are very skilled in finding out and resolving the problems, but lack the ability to project overall since the domestic social divisions are not made into precise details as project management, product management, and demand analysts in technical persons. Dissimilarities seen in the 70%-80% technical persons in Chinese Software Company are that only 10% of technical persons pursue the technical research in American software enterprises. The majority of the other people do the marketing, final period support service, and an assortment of other services inline with the previous two. The marketing people in an American company are with customers every day, they know about the certain demands of customers and use this knowledge as feedback to the technical persons. In a domestic company, technicians sit at home to make the programming and develop the new products while using their own thinking modes. Overseas software's superiority is at the design idea and deeper understanding of the sales. Just like the ERP of SAP, the process of implementing is a baptism to the enterprise management thought mode.

The Marketing mode with Chinese Characteristics

From product itself, BB still holds much of “overseas” attributes, but in the aspect of sales and marketing, it discloses itself with a large amount of Chinese characteristics.

When e-Learning are implemented, foreign institutions usually labor out a comprehensive plan which includes its investment, practicability, expectations, strategy, assessment standards, etc. in advance in order to guarantee the final effectiveness. While in domestic institutions, e-Learning is often constructed in an irregular way; projects are often regarded simply as new research tasks to deal with. Due to this technique, the domestic institutions would prefer to procure the e-Learning systems instead of renting and using ASP service. The inland users are also in less acceptability in price than in the developed countries. With full consideration of the Chinese users’ features, Cerbibo builds the payment terms which is charged based on the user’s quantity, not the faculty.

Divergent from other direct sales in other countries, BB establishes the jointly-ventured company of its own in China, which is also the only one around the world. Except for the Chinese preference policy, BB is more interested in CERNET’s superiorities in all sides: the countrywide available fiber-optical transmission network with total capacity of 40G and 160 inland cities reach scope; achievement of over 95% users from colleges and universities, all kinds of education and science & research institutes to connect with the international internet and main network; and achievement of number of users up to over 10,000,000. With any doubt, CERNET provides the important platform for BB’s development in China with its higher education resources and sales channels.

China is the only country that BB provides the technical installment service. In comparison with enough installments and debugging technology strength in an institution’s Information Management Department aboard, in China, there are only one or two teachers that manage the information technology department in each college. Therefore, technical support is essential and required. What’s more, BB supplies some Chinese institutes with free technical training, including the system administrators training. “

We do not only provide software, but also a platform and an environment." The platform embodies two major meanings: first, while enjoying the convenient, open, stable, and strong functions, the education institutions can exchange and share the network education sources with the other users and famous foreign universities, which have made many teaching contents based on international uniform standards; second, it is to build an exchange environment for e-Learning among the users by BB.

BB organizes the global users’ conference and all other kinds of academic symposiums every year, where clients can discuss any questions that may arise in the process of the e-Learning implementation and any other problems that they would like to address. No matter what differences exist in diverse countries, the final objective of e-Learning is to speed up the teaching reform and to promote teaching quality. Some Chinese clients that attend the conferences are surprised at the exceptional growth rate of the e-Learning. The successful experience in other countries have taught these attendants that e-Learning can no longer be ignored,

At the Cerbibo e-Learning Academic Symposium in 2006, the assistant director Shijun Dong from Chinese Ocean University introduced the new active and initiative Underground Teaching Operation System with combining respect to improving students’ overall development. It is believed that his introduction will cause many colleagues’ attention to reformat their opinions on online teaching projects. Meanwhile, the encouraging speech made by Haixin Song, who is from the Modern Education Technology Center in Sias International University, was beneficial. Song passed the information that stated when the traditional blackboard is replaced by the projecting apparatus and whiteboard, there will finally only be one last blackboard, "Blackboard." With the comparison between Chinese and International situations, he calls on an urgent transformation of Chinese traditional teaching mode. This statement helps reveal BB’s care and thought on strengthening users' understanding and trusts on its products.

Root in China, from the biggest market in the future

The recognition from the BB’s high-rise leaders to Chinese culture also displays BB’s emphasis on marketing localization. Cerbibo's former COO Karl in his two-year term of office, has gone around 23 provinces and 30 cities in China to unearth the customers’ demands. Although he was still unused to the Chinese hospitable treatment, it is gratified that he and his colleagues built nearly 100 customers and witnessed the growth of e-Learning in China’s education industry. The new COO, in spite of his poor Chinese, insists on saying hello to customers in Chinese, and even calls himself -“Kangqiao” which means of numerous Chinese characteristics. All this shows the strong determination of BB to take root in China and to support China’s growth.

Blackboard’s general global income was $180,000,000 in 2005, in which Chinese aggregate sales were under $ 10,000,000. Although Cerbibo users increased 140 times this year than that in 2004, its ratio is still very minute from a global perspective. To some extent, it’s because e-Learning in China is still at an initial stage. However, it doesn’t weaken the BB’s confidence on the Chinese market. It is still believed that since BB has already saturated American’s market, China will become the next biggest market for e-Learning.

From the common experience of global education partnership, BB summarized an operation development trend on education technology. That means that e-Learning will basically run through five stages: exploratory stage, faculty support stage, institutional strategy stage, essential stage and technology, and teaching reform stage. At present, parts of foreign institutions have gone into the fifth stage of the reform stage, and many Chinese institutions have also developed rapidly with the various stages.

BB leaders believe that China's e-Learning should not be complicated to extend because of the leaps and bounds with the joint-efforts from the government, institutions management, and the teachers on the front line. From the industrial point of view, they believe that the future of e-Learning in the market competition is very variable, where even some small excellent companies in certain areas may become BB’s potential competitors. However, BB’s one fierce weapon to keep competitiveness is still to focus on the education industry with continuous innovations.