Attendees

Arnie, Khali, Anne West, Nate, David Moldoff

Agenda

Business Model

Discussion

Our Goal is to grow adoption, but we need to address sustainability and scalability.

Where will the infrastructure be hosted?

Challenge will be that you have three rather different consumers of the service -- students, universities, value-added services providers (for and non-profit). 

We agree that we should make every attempt to hold the students harmless relative to fees (although a "life-time account" could be a challenge as we accumulate IDs).  Discussion addressing not charging the student was emphasized.

Who owns the Account?

How long do we have the Account?  What if it is unused for X years, do we archive it?

Should each institution pay a subscription fee?  Should vendors who want to access the services, pay a connection fee?

We are thinking about a "free" period of say, 3 or 5 years after which the student might be billed a nominal amount to retain their account.

An alternative of course is allowing for marketing of some kind and making up the cost that way. From the university perspective which is typically very sensitive to FTEs, truing up costs to actual student counts is pretty important -- any meaningful measure of the 'cost of recruiting per student' would drive the university folks to construct the cost/per and use that in comparisons to other institutions. My suggestion is that one model might be some "pre-selling" of accounts (in say, 10K student increments) with a process for back-billing for actual usage (if it goes over the per-commit number) and a commitment to true up to actual on the annual renewal cycle. I would set the renewals to be at the same point for everyone (January or in Q4 would be likely good opportunities for a renewal). We could add a "bonus" for early adopters that they will not get dinged for overages for the first year (which works if we have enough participation to cover the costs).

We need to address the business value - versus cost.  What value will CommIT offer stakeholders?  

Each stakeholder has different reasons to support/adopt or not to support/adopt.

What is the value proposition?  That is where we left the discussion.  We need to define the value proposition for stakeholders next: Student, Institution, Vendor, State, etc.