Education suppliers place Bett on virtual reality and cloud
VR headsets, drones and interactive screen stole the show at this year's Bett show, but will it actually be cloud adoption that emerges as the big edtech trend of 2017, asks Tom Wright?
London's ExCel arena become the centre of attention for the edtech sector again last week, as education and technology joined forces to showcase the latest in digital learning at the Bett show.
Much has been made of virtual reality (AR) and augmented reality (AR) over the last year, with a number of relatively affordable products coming to the market. Samsung's Gear VR is priced at under £100 - and was on show in mass at Bett - while cheaper versions ranging from £12-£30 are also available.
While Microsoft last year announced deals with HP, Dell, Lenovo, Asus and Acer to have the vendors ship VR headsets with Windows 10 software, Microsoft's own HoloLens is undoubtedly the jewel in its crown.
HoloLens uses mixed reality to blend the real world with holograms that appear on the visor at the front of the headset.
"A lot of people are talking about doing this thing," said HoloLen's EMEA commercial lead Roger Walkden. "There are prototypes available, there are flashy videos, but no one has a device available that you can buy in a store right now."
While Walkden would not say how many HoloLens devices Microsoft has sold, he did say that sales are "in the thousands not hundreds of thousands".
There is however one stumbling block when it comes to schools adopting HoloLens - the price. There are currently two options available. The development version of the headset is £2,719, but this can only be used for development purposes. The version needed to run the HoloLens modules is £4,259, which is surely out of reach for the average school.
When asked whether schools are locked out of HoloLens because of the price, Walkden said it will be some time before the product sees mass adoption - but could not give any details as to how the price will change over time.
"I can't tell you much about the actual price point for the HoloLens, but you have to remember that it's very early days," he said.
"It will take some time before you move down the route of one [device], to two, to five, to 10. I think that is a process that will take years to be honest, so it's all about finding really good, core applications that are relevant to those universities and those schools."
While the price of of the device may seem daunting, Walkden pointed out that there is potential in the future for the device to become part of a wider package for schools, potentially as part of a managed services solution.
Stretched budgets
The pressure on school budgets in the UK is no secret, with a study by the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT) last week finding that the number of schools in deficit has more than doubled from eight per cent to 18 per cent since 2015.
In terms of IT, a solution that appears to be gaining traction in schools is the as-a-service model.
SMART Technologies launched its ‘classroom-as-a-service' offering last year and speaking to CRN at Bett, CEO Neil Gaydon expressed his disbelief that schools haven't moved to the solutions models seen in enterprises.
"If you had a company of a thousand people you'd have an IT department and you'd be strenuous as to what is going into that company, and you'd more than likely have a finance package in place," he said.
"Schools on the other hand are going from feast to famine with budgets; they don't build in anything for training, or very little; and they have a free-for-all of what people can buy or use.
"We brought in a revolutionary funding model where schools instead of having to pay out big lumps of money can spread the cost over a number of years and because SMART boards depreciate the least of any technology in a classroom it means it's very cheap to finance that."
On the infrastructure side, education institutes are looking to adopt solutions-based approaches, attendees at the show said.
Howard Hall, managing director at HP partner DTP Group, said that universities in particular are starting to look at hyper-converged solutions as a viable option.
"There are a lot of higher-education and further-education establishments moving to a cloud model and I think it's been slow to move," he said.
"Public sector is always slower to move than commercial because they're not necessarily driven by the same values in terms of being profit based, but we're seeing a lot more uptake.
"There's a real acceleration into [hyper convergence] - an automation of tasks which typically had people doing stuff for low level tasks. We are seeing a lot of that in terms of some of the bids we're responding to.
"In terms of servers, compute is becoming a commodity place and the way around that is to converge it into hyper converged."
Hall also said DTP is seeing traction in its device-as-a-service solution - launched at the end of last year - which he expects to continue into 2017.
Education learns cloud lesson
While the show was stolen by the VR headsets, drones and interactive screens, the channel partners in attendance were unanimous in predicting where the majority of the education sector's money will be going this year.
While the education institutions have seemingly been slow in embracing cloud technology Daley Robinson, director at public sector reseller Stone, said that cloud adoption is starting to increase.
"For us it's the education sector catching up with what the technology sector has been promoting for a number of years," he said.
"Whether that's Microsoft Azure starting to be understood and adopted by educational institutions or Office 365 which was launched seven years ago now - only now are schools starting to adopt and deploy that on mass; and Google Chromebook which has been a slow burn in the UK and hasn't historically had the traction that the US has had.
"I think there's an element of the UK coming in line with some of the other markets globally and an element of education aligning with what the [IT] industry has been trying to push for a while."
Robinson attributed the increased interest in the public cloud to the first datacentres arriving in the UK - with both Microsoft and AWS opening UK-based facilities last year.
He also said that there have been a number of public cloud wins in other public sector bodies which has reassured educational institutions that it is safe and alternative to on-premises solutions - citing deals done with the Army and Ministry of Defence.
Big guns set to up their game
While the uptake in cloud for the education sector is unanimously agreed upon, smaller vendors not utilising cloud software from one of the big vendors are going to struggle to hold their ground, according to Nigel Steljes, CEO of interactive touch screen vendor Avocor.
Steljes claimed the channel needs to prepare for a shift away from smaller vendors with their own proprietary software to mass adoption of cloud-based software from the likes of Microsoft, Google and Cisco.
"Cisco, Google, Dell, Microsoft - all these people are coming out with their own interactive devices for education," he said.
"Whereas before [there was] the dominance of smaller manufacturers like Smart Technologies and Promethean with their own propriety software - I think the world is changing and I think people like Microsoft and the 365 platform are going to be dominant.
"I think the change in 2017 is going to be the move away from smaller companies and bespoke solutions to Google, Android, Microsoft [etc.] - these guys are going to start to assert themselves.
"If you try and go up against Microsoft and compete with their software platform you're probably not going to win, but if you're like Avocor and you say ‘I'm going to work with these guys and make our solution the best on the market place' then you've got a good chance of being taken seriously'."