#31 Emerging Markets Leader's Talk -Episode&Guest #2-, Ha Dau, Co-Founder and Chairwoman of OMT Vietnam

Respect the others and think of their success first before our success

Aug 27, 2024

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We want to feature unique and valuable top business and social leaders from emerging markets contributing to not only their home community and nation, but also to global with good mission and vision, trying to deeply share about the essence of their walking steps, activities, challenge, achievements, vision, and personal stories to our subscribers(pure learners) worldwide.

So that, our readers can grasp a lot of inspiration, hints, ideas, knowledge, and thoughts well from it to add more values to each of their lives on their emerging front sites.

Our prime 2nd Guest is Ms.Ha Dau, Co-Founder and Chairwoman of OMT Vietnam.

Let’s talk with her !

Episode & Guest #1: Mr.Sleem Hasan, Founder and CEO of Privity FZ LLE(UAE)

#30 Emerging Markets Leader's Talk -Episode&Guest #1-, Sleem Hasan, Founder and CEO of Privity FZ LLE(UAE)

Hiroyuki Itoh

July 8, 2024

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1. About your individual career and activities in Vietnam and Global so far?

→Hello, my name is Ha Dau (Hannah) and I am the cofounder of Vietnamese edtech company OMT (http://omt.vn).

We provide cloud-based school operations management services in the form of SaaS (software as a service). Specifically, we provide:

- KidsOnline (http://kidsonline.edu.vn), Vietnam’s most popular kindergarten (preschool) operations management software and app;

- SchoolOnline (https://www.schoolonline.edu.vn) to manage multi-campus, multi-curriculum schools (mostly private school);

- CenterOnline (http://center.edu.vn), a solution to manage tutoring, enrichment centers.

In this Talk, I’d want to focus more on our 2 flagship solutions, KidsOnline and SchoolOnline.

It is a bit unusual that I actually did not study technology in college. I was lucky to work for Hewlett-Packard (HP) for over 6 years during HP’s early days in Vietnam, and at HP I fell in love with technology. By founding OMT, my team chooses to focus on bringing technology to education institutions, like the kindergartens and schools, because they used to be over-looked, under-served by “big tech” technology providers, especially when it comes to school operations management.

So far we have been especially successful with KidsOnline being used in over 1200 kindergartens in Vietnam, and have launched international versions of KidsOnline for English-speaking countries, Laos and Indonesia.

Interestingly, now we have started to have partners in Africa who are interested to introduce KidsOnline to the kindergartens in Africa, especially in Kenya and Nigeria. We are very excited to be able to provide service to a continent with a young population like Africa and work with like-minded partners from many African countries.

2. About your Company/Organization

→My company provides a web-based and app platform for schools, kindergartens and tutoring centers to manage their daily operations, from student enrollment, parent-school communications, student health monitor, school bus management to school facilities management, finance and invoicing.

We have a 80-people team in Hanoi and Hochiminh City, Vietnam, and work with partners in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and Laos (and soon in Kenya and Nigeria) to provide KidsOnline to kindergartens in these countries.

3. About your business and services at the organization/company?

→“Edtech” became a buzzword during the covid years where schools in many countries, including Vietnam, had to close for long periods of time, and had no choice but to continue providing education online.

However, all our edtech services (KidsOnline, SchoolOnline and CenterOnline) were started long before covid, and all have “online” as part of their name, as we have strong conviction that schools will embrace “online” technologies, that technology is the best friend of students, teachers and school administrators alike.

Covid-induced online learning in particular and the irreversible trend towards digital transformation of all facets of life and society in general have worked in our favor, speeding up the adoption of technology at schools, kindergartens and tutoring centers in Vietnam and elsewhere.

KidsOnline and SchoolOnline are handy, affordable tools for the administrators and managers of educational institutions to manage their operations from student enrollment to learning and teaching operations to finances and school-parent communication. What makes our solutions different from many other School Management Systems is that we believe in a holistic, all-rounded approach to systems management. Instead of providing the school with a set of separate, standalone solutions, we built a fully integrated system that could serve even schools with multiple campuses and multiple curricula, for them to manage their operation either in a centralized or decentralized manner. This is a very similar to the way an Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) solution serves a business.

One more thing about our School Management Services is the affordability factor. Coming from Vietnam, a country where the government emphasizes affordable education to all young people, OMT started from day one with a mission to offer affordable solutions to the Vietnamese schools and kindergartens. Our service fee is consistently around one US dollar (1.00 USD) per month per student account and all teachers and administrator accounts are free. W also support schools and kindergartens with system onboarding with a minimal fee.

With our School Management Solutions to be both holistic, all-rounded and affordable, it is now possible for us to provide service not just to the schools and kindergartens in Vietnam but in many other countries with similar socio-economic conditions with Vietnam. We are very excited about the future of being able to provide our cloud services to educational institutions around the world.

4. The market and industry landscape in your marketing nation including their emerging markets?

→Post covid, we see schools and educators in both Vietnam and other countries embracing technology in a more thoughtful way, going from one extreme of “having to go online because my brick and mortar school is closed due to covid” to the other extreme of “now that covid is over, I will ditch all online tools and systems” to a balanced view of “I will choose among online tools and systems that I got to use during covid, and keep using only those that truly help my productivity and teaching/learning outcomes”. Schools, kindergartens and tutoring centers are now embracing technology on their terms, and that’s good news for school-essential solution providers like OMT.

In Vietnam, the Government sets a strategy to digital transformation of all schools with specific deliverables and expected outcomes by the year 2025 (next year!), and towards 2030.

There are still many challenges to overcome in order for schools to fully embrace digital transformation. First and foremost is the device readiness level. Vietnamese schools and students are not fully equipped with smart devices in the classrooms (Vietnamese schools are not yet at the level of “one child one device”). The learning resources for digital smartclassrooms are also being developed and will need significantly more resources for fully development.

However, with preschools and schools becoming more compatible with digital learning, the roles of School Management Systems like SchooOnline and KidsOnline are becoming more and more pronounced. We are actively working together with hardware, devices providers and educational content providers to make it comprehensive and effective for schools to deploy these solutions in their schools smoothly, seamlessly.

5. Point of the Business risks and difficulties(hard points)?

→During covid edtech mushroomed; many are “nice to have”, some are “must have” edtech. There was a perceived overload of edtech solutions, making it hard for customers (the schools, kindergartens and tutoring centers) to decide on what to use. Nowadays, the difficulties are different: industry observers are speaking about an “edtech funding winter” and lower spending on technology among education institutions.

For us at OMT, we are lucky to have a strong home base in our Vietnam market. Going global during this time of high level of uncertainty in the global politics and economy is a challenge. Having established close-bonded partners in countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Laos, we take the new market entry risks in a gradual manner.

6. The reason and background to start the business and seek for the values growth and expansion?

→As I mentioned above I'm a technology enthusiast from my days working for Hewlett-Packard (HP). I constantly think about what technology can do to improve the life of myself, my family, my community, my country and beyond. When I see that in Vietnam smaller schools and kindergartens are so underserved by bigger technology providers, I think that is the area that I might potentially make the most impact.

In Vietnam there is a famous saying by President Ho Chi Minh “To reap a return in 10 years, plat tree. To reap a return in 100 years, cultivate the people”. When my co-founders and I set up our educational technology business, we know that we are embarking on a long journey; we know that our business will constantly evolve, as technology changes fast and the operations of schools and kindergartens also change very fast.

7. The mission and vision?

→With OMT being the provider of School Management Systems to schools and preschools, our mission is to enable all schools and preschools in the developing world with technology; make technology work for their most important stakeholders:the teachers, the students, and the school managers and administrators. We see our mission to professionalize the management of operations of schools and preschools everywhere. And since our services are provided on the cloud, our motto is “Bring your schools and preschools to the cloud!”.

8. Your individual plans in next 3 years, 5 years, 10 years in/with Vietnam and Global?

→For the next three to five years, we have both horizontal and vertical plans. Our horizontal plan is to have KidsOnline and SchoolOnline to be used in 10, then 30, then 50 countries in the world. The vertical plan is to tailor our school management solution to as many different kinds of schools and preschools as possible; to make teachers, students and school administrators think of SchoolOnline and KidsOnline integral part of their daily life.

Our 10-year plan is to become a seamless platform for the next generation of schools and preschools. SchoolOnline and KidsOnline will no longer be just a school operations management platform, operating inside schools and preschools, but our services become an integral part of a digital society serving digital learning communities.

9. Type of business partners you are seriously looking for now?

→We are looking for partners in other countries who are passionate about technology and education as we are who already have connections with the schools, preschools, and education service providers in those countries. We look for partners who want to do business in a sustainable and long-term way; always looking for better ways to provide services to the schools and preschools, and also having an impact the education technology policies of their country or the community. Above all, we want to become a network of friends and not just business partners. As mentioned above, we have a comprehensive web page specifying whom we look for in our in-country partners, how we want to work with each other (https://partner.kidsonline.edu.vn/. Partner KidsOnline).

When we start discussion with a new in country partner, we start with identifying the specific, sometime unique characters of the schools and preschools that we are going to serve, then work with in-country partner to localize KidsOnline and SchoolOnline to best serve the needs of the schools and preschool in that country. We also study the national education strategy of the country in order to align our vision with the country’s vision for education. We make it our priority to support our in-country partners to develop thriving community of technology-enabled educators, students and school administrators.

10. Tips from your uniquely challenging career and life journey?

→I do not think my life is special in any way. Come to think of it, I am lucky to be Vietnamese, and to know a thing called a “Personal Development Plan” (PDP) at the right time in life. Let me explain.

I started my business in the early 2000s, when Vietnam as a country was undergoing drastic and rapid changes. The whole country of Vietnam is highly entrepreneurial, so I think since I live and breathe everyday within the entrepreneur atmosphere of Vietnam, it was not that scary for me to take risks, to start new business, to find co-founders to try new things, and move on if those things do not work, and believe that tomorrow is always a brighter day than today.

The second lucky thing is when I started working in Hewlett-Packard, my manager introduced me to a totally new concept which is a Personal Development Plan (PDP). The PDP is used in Hewlett-Packard for staff review and planning business goals and KPIs. However I realized that I also need a PDP for my personal life. At that time I was going into my 30 years old; I had a family and two kids. My HP manager encouraged me to write a PDP for my personal life and revisit the personal PDP from time to time. With such a PDP I was able to discuss my plan to quit a salary job at a multinational company like HP to start my own business with my husband, and I was very lucky to have the family’s full support. I was also very lucky to have co-founders who trusted my business instincts and work hard together to overcome challenges to where we are today.

11. Essence of success of your global business and career

→Since we started to explore the education market beyond Vietnam 2 years ago, right after covid, we have found out that it is critical to have local partners and players. So my company was lucky that we were accepted to the Eduspaze accelerator (https://www.eduspaze.com/), the Singapore based accelerator especially for edtech startups that want to scale up their business regionally. Thanks to Eduspaze, we were able to get deep insights into the education systems of key countries in Southeast Asia, namely Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and the Philippines both at macro and micro level. The business partner connections we got from Eduspaze have proved to be beneficial to the growth of our services beyond Vietnam tremendously.

So in my experience, having access to like-minded interested local partners in each country, respect the partners, think of their success before our success is the secret to long-term success.

12. Any message and advice to corporates(or individuals) who are willing to collaborate with companies in emerging markets, Vietnam, and global? Any message and advise to corporates who are willing to collaborate with Japanese companies?

→For companies planning to enter emerging markets like Vietnam, I think making the best use of available resources, notably the online resources and the various government and non-governmental support for market entries is critical. In Vietnam, foreign business can reach out to the investment promotion agencies at Ministry of Planning and Investment (MPI), the investment promotion agencies of provinces as well as the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industries (VCCI).

What’s more, nowadays, with automated translation online as a handy tool, there is very very little language barrier! And travel to Vietnam is easy and affordable too.

Taking from our own experience for companies who want to collaborate with foreign companies like Japanese companies, the most effective and reliable source of support is actually JETRO, the Japanese government’s trade promotion office. The Vietnam office of JETRO is dynamic and proactive, and they are very thoughtful to match Vietnamese companies with Japanese companies having relevant profiles. So among all the trade and business promotion agencies, I would highly recommend companies to start working with JETRO in your country or territory.

Our friend, Ha san, is a truly active entrepreneur and global mover, coming up from rapid changing nation in Asia, Vietnam.

Having wide and deep mission and vision in global perspective, she has been successful with her KidsOnline being used in over 1200 kindergartens in Vietnam, and have launched international versions of the KidsOnline for English-speaking countries, Laos and Indonesia, and interestingly, now they started to have partners even in Africa.

She said that Vietnam as a country was undergoing drastic and rapid changes, and the whole country of Vietnam is highly entrepreneurial, so since she live and breathe everyday within the entrepreneur atmosphere of Vietnam, it was not that scary for her to take risks, to start new business, to find co-founders to try new things, and move on if those things do not work, and believe that tomorrow is always a brighter day than today.

That somehow shows big potential of entrepreneur born from emerging nations, like here Vietnam, so that we can expect their further growth and contribution to regional and global fields outside of their home base nation.

She is often saying that I was very lucky, but her personality, mentality, and embedded strong professionalism and vision can attract and receive a lot of good support and cooperation from others. It was not just a lucky happening but was greatly influenced by herself, her inner part.

Impressed by her way of thinking; respect the partners, think of their success first before our success. That is definitely the secret to long term success in emerging markets businesses.

I am pretty sure that she can keep improving the life of herself, her family, her community, her country and beyond with her technology and solution, looking to more positive and successful future in the world for somebody others around her.

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