Our Company Opinsys works on pretty much everything related to schools information technology. Our main focus is to make technology at schools work seamlessly and help students and teachers to concentrate on learning. Our team consists of different people from software developers to teachers. The business model is based for the most part on service contracts, but also hardware sales. Our service is tailored for schools and our main customer base forms from individual public/private schools, cities, and partners. Currently most of the schools using our service are located in Finland, but in the past year there has been active deployment also in Germany. We also have a partner in Switzerland using our technology. Overall I would estimate that we have about a couple of hundred schools and about 20-30000 devices using our operating system and service.
Typical service contract is based on monthly fees based on the amount of devices used or amount of students. This one price can include all of the following or parts of it depending on the contract:
- 1st level support and helpdesk for teachers and students at school
- educating teacher on use of technology and give pedagogical
- Local support at schools if
- Device and user management (Puavo web)
- Integration of student management to our user management (automatic user account creation)
- Integration of user accounts to 3rd party services (for example to login with our puavo user accounts to google, azure, nextcloud, etc.)
- Our Opinsys OS (Puavo OS) updates and support and development
- iPad and Android management with 3rd party mdm
Although most of our Finnish customers somewhat have the full service model, there is also variation on this. Some only use our cloud services and OS and we offer only 2nd level support. This can typically be tailored on the needs of the customer and their needs/resources/knowhow/capabilities.
As for hardware sales we also sell different hardware that we have found useful and good for schools use. This could range from educational robots to projectors typically to fulfill our service and to make things easier for schools. The biggest hardware sales item currently is our refurbished laptops. We sell and support typically 3 year old business laptops.
Here is one quite recent case from germany
https://opinsys.com/contact/opinsyss-pre-owned-laptops-become-a-green-export-product-to-germany/Puavo is the name of our open source project that has now been developed for over 10 years. It is our in-house developed software with the aim to provide tools to manage large-scale computer systems at schools. Although it has been open source right from the beginning, the main focus has been to develop a tool for our own and business needs. There has not been enough effort to make it easy to install/deploy your own instance. This can be done, but unfortunately there isn't any easy "click and install this app" solution available. If you or someone else would be interested in this perspective I'm sure we can give guidance on this. But at this point to get the whole puavo web infra and OS image building up and running, will most likely require "some time and tobacco" , so to speak :) .
Therefore for a quick demo environment I could arrange access to a demo organization in our production puavo web instance and give the latest production operating system image. This would make it possible for you to see how the system works and "tastes" like. To build and deploy it yourself is possible, but would take a lot more effort.