At this year’s Ellucian users’ conference #elive15, one of the two big stories has been that Ellucian acquired the Helix LMS, including taking on the development team. I have previously described the Helix LMS in “Helix: View of an LMS designed for competency-based education” as well as the subsequent offer for sale in “Helix Education puts their competency-based LMS up for sale”. The emerging market for CBE-based learning platforms is quickly growing, at least in terms of pilot programs and long-term potential, and Helix is one of the most full-featured, well-designed systems out there. (more…)
Tag: Sungard
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The Datatel-SunGard Higher Education Merger
This is a guest post from Jim Farmer, Chairman of Sigma Systems, Inc.
[Editor’s note: I have had this post from Jim for a while now and am only now getting a chance to publish it. Apologies to Jim and to you.]
On August 4th Hellman-Friedman LLC filed with the Security and Exchange Commission a planned press release announcing the merger of Datatel and SunGard Higher Education. The SEC filing did note the merger excluded the SunGard Higher Education K-12 Education business, which had been combined with higher education only a few months ago.
Hellman-Friedman LLC, a private equity firm, and partners own Datatel. Hellman-Friedman was offering $1.775 billion for the higher education part of SunGard Higher Education to create a merged firm..
SunGard Inc. acquired Systems and Computer Technology (SCT) in February 2004. In March 2005 SunGard Inc. itself was acquired by private equity firm Silver Lakes Partners.
At that time Campus Technology’s John Savarese summarized the issue:
In a financial world in which takeovers are often motivated by the desire to achieve economies through radical restructuring or cost-cutting, or where buyers purchase a company because they see the opportunity to quickly sell off assets, customers often have reason to be nervous. And higher ed customers have an added reason to worry: Running a university or college is not just another vertical market; successful software vendors have taken years to tune their offerings to the special needs and operating culture of the campus. Understandably, there is always the concern that new owners may not understand the importance of doing business in the native language of academe.
Another issue. On April 10th 2011 Peter Thiel—a co-founder of payPal, hedge fund manager and venture capitalist—said “We’re in a Bubble … It’s Higher Education.
Tech Crunch’s Sarah Lacy reported
Instead, for Thiel, the bubble that has taken the place of housing is the higher education bubble. “A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed,” he says. “Education may be the only thing people still believe in the United States.”
“Like any good bubble, this belief– while rooted in truth– gets pushed to unhealthy levels.”
A look at the numbers may suggest Hellman-Friedman alternatives.
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SunGard Delivers Sakai Support Through rSmart Partnership
This is pretty big news. SunGard will be providing Sakai support services to its customers. If you’re interested in Sakai, you can contract with SunGard to get help migrating, setting up integration, and training faculty, as well as ongoing hosting and support. They’ll be doing this, in part, through a partnership in which rSmart is basically subcontracted by SunGard to provide the hosting and support subscription services. This is great news for both companies, SunGard’s customers, and the Sakai community in general, the latter of which I expect to expand substantially because of this development. But this also provides a textbook case of just how well open source and open standards can work to provide better offerings in the marketplace when they are working well. People who don’t have experience with them—particularly with open source—often scratch their heads at how they can possibly work out. In fact, open source allows for the unbundling of services that are typically tied together in a private source vendor model, opening up new possibilities for business models and risk management strategies. Open standards enhance that flexibility while creating new opportunities for collaboration among even competing vendors.
Let’s take a closer look at how this deal works for each of the parties involved.
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Jenzibar Planning to Support IMS Learning Information Services Standard
I mentioned here recently that SunGard has committed to supporting IMS Learning Information Services in their next release, making them the second major SIS provider to do so. (Oracle, my employer, has supported it in Peoplesoft Campus Solutions for about a year now.) There’s a press release out from the IMS confirming this now, and also bringing the exciting news that Jenzabar “has also joined SunGard Higher Education and Oracle to support the LIS standard.” Also according to the press release, “Support from these three organizations means that LIS will be supported by suppliers that collectively comprise about two-thirds of the vendor-based, higher education student systems market in North America.”
Now, the Jenzabar announcement is news to me. I’m not sure if they’ve attended any working group meetings yet, and I’m also not sure if they’ve made a commitment to supporting LIS in a particular release yet. Still, this is another really solid step forward for the standard.
There are more LIS announcements to come, too.