At MPS, all three of its business segments—corporate, education, and research—are poised for growth. “Requests for immersive solutions came in early and with sustained traction when the pandemic forced everyone to go digital overnight,” says chairman and CEO Rahul Arora. “Our corporate clients, for instance, were looking for digital onboarding and virtual solutions to deliver a livelier experience to their workforce.”
The partnership between Swisscom and MPS Europa is a case in point. “The goal was to reinvent the shop onboarding for their sales staff with digital twins of their retail stores,” Arora says. “Our team developed a cloud-based VR solution to power an immersive and highly interactive experience that enabled Swisscom to onboard new employees during the pandemic.” Other clients, including two major European railroad organizations, used MPS’s AR-Living Paper solution to bring static content to life via mobile phones.
Phenomenal growth in MPS’s e-learning business is projected over the next 12 to 24 months. “There is an inherent momentum across simulations, serious games, digital onboarding, and eXtended Reality [XR] solutions,” says Arora, whose company is also seeing great traction in its workflow, analytics, and subscription management platforms. “Our recent acquisition of e-learning company E.I. Design further strengthens our expertise in this segment.”
The 2020 acquisition of HighWire Press has been a significant event for MPS and for the scholarly publishing marketplace. “It positions us as the provider with the most comprehensive product suite across peer review and workflow, production, hosting, analytics, access management, and subscription management,” says Arora, who has combined all of his company’s technology offerings under the HighWire umbrella brand. “It offers the marketplace a serious independent option that is not tied to a single publisher and that will actively invest in its product suite while developing an unbiased product strategy. This acquisition has improved our revenues due to its recurring nature as a SaaS and has increased our strategic alignment with clients.”
The pandemic, Arora says, “has created significant lines of differentiation between content solutions players that delivered with resilience on their robust business continuity plans, and others that faced headwinds and faltered. This differentiation has led to vendor consolidation and volume expansion across our client base.”
It has also propelled MPS into a new growth phase that Arora calls “building scale.” “I want to create a compelling learning company at a meaningful scale that helps the world learn smarter,” says Arora, who is seeing major growth in Asia Pacific and some tailwinds in the U.K. and Europe; North America remains its biggest market, with about 65% of its total revenues. “We aspire to be the provider of choice in our markets for powering experiential learning with the latest technology innovations.”
