Adventures in Higher Ed Information Technology

Open Digital Campus is the vision for how the company is planning on leveraging the higher education community with technology, service and support offerings to help ensure the successful meeting of customer goals and objectives.

5 Core Areas.

1.) Customers

Focus on the customers first – Singular direction and focus commitments to customer success.

2.) Community

Solution development partners and community source project – The Commons. Focus on renewing the commitment to community and collaboration of product management and application customization and community development.

3.) Choice

Extending the digital campus offering choices. Solutions developed to meet niche requirements that can be easily integrated into the core ERP Banner suite.

4.) Delivery

Flexible Iterativeand Incremental Delivery. Develop and sell new delivery models for Sungard Applications. Quicker to market product releases, upgrades and patches.

5.) Inovation

Continue to innovate products based upon the needs of customers while executing new and modern technology stack.

Technology Strategy

– User Interface Strategy – Consistency in the delivery of UI experience to users. Will focusing not only on Sungard delivered systems, but also partner applications to ensure the delivery of a consistent end2end user interface.

– Common User Interface Framework – Aurora. – Common Header and Footer to be used to frame Sungard and partner applications. Local and Global Navigation.

– Focus on refinement on the look and feel of both INB and SSB applications.

The New User Interface will be rolled out through the INB, SSB and Luminis 5.x. All of the information concerning partner adoption of standard UI will be made available to the public.

Mobile Devices and Applications – Mentioned that  mobile devices and applications should be part of the technology strategy. Not much was stated concerning the current progress being made in these regards.

Upgrade Technology – Several teams are currently focusing on disecting the upgrade technology issues. Have determined that the development environment for sungard engineers must be revised. The goal is to improve the upgrade technology support and processes… Planning on rolling out yet this year….. rolling out what exactly? Unknown based on the presentation.

Infinity = SOA

– New BPM tool, Cloud Computing, Identity Management  – Freely Available. Standards based.

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Commentary.

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This session displayed SunGard as a company in transition in both executive leadership and strategy. The previous closed vendor model has hampered Sungard’s ability to provide agile product development, product delivery, support and professional services delivery. I am pleased to see Sungard moving to a more collaborative product development and delivery model. The Commons concept has the potential of revitalizing the company, specifically in the delivery of Banner development and support, and also revitalizing the customer community.

One concern that is still out there is Sungard HE’s strategy to focus on building niche bolt-on applications. Though this model provides more ‘choice’ to the customer, it will continue to segment Banner baseline functionality while enabling Sungard HE to charge for new ‘niche’ functionality that should be extended to baseline. Breaking the ERP model into niche bolt-on components offers expanded sources of revenue. This model is not community centered and is highly focused on increasing revenue from new product sales rather than maintaining existing client investments at a suitable level.

Regards,

TJ