Kindly share your feedback on how GoodFirms has been doing so far in increasing your visibility among potential clients.
GoodFirms has generated a steady inflow of interest in our Open Source e-learning software Chamilo, which has helped grow our community and, through the natural process of Open Source, grow the number of customers for our network of official providers. Being able to compare software of the same category between each other is a killer feature for most of our users.
Please introduce your product and give a brief about your role within the organization.
Chamilo is an e-learning solution used in the academic, corporate, and associative sectors worldwide (in 192 countries). The project was born in 2010, based at the time on another 9-year-old solution, which makes it a very robust, complete, secure, and regularly updated solution. More than 30M people in more than 75k organizations have used it between 2010 and 2021.
As the president of the Chamilo Association, I make sure people can find the right information about the Chamilo software, that the software remains Free Software (Open Source) for anyone to use and that all professional actors find a way to contribute to the project if they want to, for the benefit of the general public. I also lead our very passionate team towards our goal to “Increase the availability of quality education worldwide”.
What was the objective behind coming up with this software?
As an Association, we recognize our world’s progress towards sustainability (both for energy and social aspects) relies on education, and that the main issues of education are quality and availability. By developing software that is free to use, free to customize to your needs, and free to distribute, we empower literally anyone with the tools to improve both of these aspects of education. We hope that this will actively help lead us, as a species, to a better future.
This is not to say that we are blissful dreamers. Most of us are running businesses that provide specialized services to organizations to help them accelerate their adoption of e-learning and generate massive savings or reach far-fetching goals by digitalizing different aspects of their staff training needs.
How is your software beneficial from a value addition perspective to the clients compared to other software alternatives available in the market?
Being a “one-size fits all” kind of solution, Chamilo has to be as easy to use as one could dream of. We have designed a solution that is highly customizable through standard tools, avoiding vendor lock-in issues, so common in our space.
Many of the organizations using Chamilo have chosen to do that in-house, which can provide them with additional security in the era of SaaS services, but for those with more standard requirements, there are many SaaS alternatives to that.
Setting up a test server can be done in as little as 15 minutes, which allows you to do rapid prototyping and check if Chamilo is the right solution for you.
Chamilo is a no-bullsh** solution. Try it, verify you have what you need in there, then start using it the way you want.
What industries do you generally cater to? Which industries in general are highly benefiting by using your software?
The most obvious industries are the ones with a lot of training needs. Usually, industries with high regulatory controls (health, passenger transport, finance, telecommunications, government) but also industries with a lot of staff turnover (call centers, all types of industries with sales representatives) and, of course, a huge amount of our users are from the education sector (from primary school to university, to lifelong learning institutions), which is probably the sector benefitting the most from the “free to use” aspect of the Free Software license.
Due to its flexible nature (“Chamilo” is a derivative from “Chameleon” which symbolizes adaptability), it’s really a sector-agnostic solution, as far as we’ve been able to observe in our 20+ years of existence.
What are the key features of your software that makes it stand apart from your competitor products in the market?
We don’t really like to fall into the “key features that make it stand apart” thing... Of all the features GoodFirms.co reports on, Chamilo checks each and every one of them (although these have not been verified by your team yet). At this point, we consider Chamilo to offer everything you might need.
In our view, the issue is not “which” anymore, but rather “how”, in the sense that any feature can be offered in many different ways, and each organization might need its own very specific way of providing this feature to its users. For that, you have existing options and, if you don’t find the right options, you can take it to your internal IT team or to an official Chamilo provider. Barring any complex implementation process, this will usually be available in weeks (not months) of your requirements being specififed.
What is the customer satisfaction rate according to you? What steps do you take to cater to your customer’s needs and requirements?
I have to put my official provider hat to answer this, as the Chamilo Association itself does not cater to “customers”.
The official providers have a very unique relationship with their customers because of that Free Software philosophy that is at the root of the project. In a few words, customers usually come to us after trying out Chamilo, so they recognize the added value we provide to them as facilitators of more integrated solutions and customized features.
In an interesting way, our customers have a super underrated profile that has them “simply” researching the e-learning solution they need on their own. When they come to us, they are usually planning on using Chamilo for a few years.
In practice, our relationship with them spans between 5 and 11 years, so far, which we take as a vote of confidence and a high satisfaction rate. A small number of them leave our services after a while but continue using Chamilo on their own.
Are your customers repetitive? If yes, what is the percentage of repeat customers that you have?
Most official providers’ customers have monthly or yearly contracts that they renew (many times).
Does your software product provide any resource or knowledge section for its users? If yes, what kind of material is provided to your users to help them get acquainted with your product?
There are multiple resources available, depending on the type of information you are looking for.
- Official user documentation.
- Official forum for community support.
- Official YouTube channel for video tutorials. (search YouTube for “Chamilo LMS”)
- Official providers support contact page for commercial services.
- Our developers space.
What kind of support system do you offer to your clients for catering to their queries and issues?
Official providers offer support through their own ticketing systems.
What has been the revenue for your product for 2020?
The Chamilo Association does not generate revenue. This information is specific to official providers. We measure our success in global users growth (+8M users over the last 24 months, or a 36% increase).
Where do you see your product in the next 10 years?
We believe a safe estimate of our growth by 2031 is 100M cumulative users (we already x2.5 over the last 5 years).
If all pieces of our puzzle materialize, though (funding, major leap forward with upcoming v2, integration of native videoconferencing, learning pathways, machine learning, and a series of crazy ideas that will depend on how education unfold), we could get into the billion+ cumulative users by then. The growth of our community is not limited by the number of contracts we sign. It is simply a measure of how well our software is designed. And if our development efficiency over the last 10 years is any sign of that, competitors should need goggles to even see us on the horizon.
