Michael just introduced me two posts below. I’m Michael Staton, and I’m a guest blogger.
As Michael already mentioned, my fledgling start up, Inigral, has been included in the alpha partnership with Oracle’s new release of their SIS. I wanna take this post to toot Michael’s horn a little, as he wouldn’t do something like that himself. Some people have been contentious on this blog as to why he might have joined a company like Oracle. I can’t speak for him but I can say, as someone who believes himself to fight for the forces of good, this next release of Oracle Campus Solutions 9 that he’s been working on is going to be one small step for software, one giant leap for educational technology.
This release has so much excitement attached to it because it enables a real-time relationship between the SIS and third party software, meaning that it’s now possible to run multitudes of prepopulated and always fully updated tools for a university without any extra overhead. Getting a new vendor up and running is as easy as flipping a light switch.
Activating new vendors with such speed and simplicity will result in a paradigm shift: the Higher Ed community will need to reorient its purse strings to move out of the single-stop, clunky LMS and start getting ready for more agile vendors that cost less to operate. Yeah, you heard it, more products for less money. Campuses will also need to change their vendor adoption process from lengthy conversations with all stakeholders coupled with producing top-down buy-in to an approach designed for efficiency, choice, and bottom-up adoption.
Ultimately, having more vendors compete in the marketplace that is your school will result in happy faculty, happy students, and lots of conversations about how to use web tools to improve the campus community. We’re happy to be a part of the dialog.
Tomorrow, I’ll have to toot my own horn and show you how Oracle can sync to Facebook using our product, Schools.
Aww, shucks. I bet you say that to all the corporate software leviathans.
I had made reference to Oracle as a “starship in the evil empire of closed, high-margin, ridiculously priced software,” but I figured I should take that out in case Larry ever reads your blog. If he’s anything like fake Steve Jobs makes him out to be, there’s a thin line between ending up on the bottom of the bay and getting hired as CEO of an affiliate company.