SunGard Higher Education and its customers have launched a Community Source Initiative — the first and only vendor-supported community source forum dedicated to higher education Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. The initiative is designed to bring together the insights and experience of SunGard Higher Education’s extensive user community for the benefit of all institutions; make functionality available faster; and help ensure product quality through functional and technical review.
“SunGard Higher Education’s Community Source Initiative is yet another example of its commitment to a truly Open Digital Campus vision for its customers,” said Nicole Engelbert, Practice Leader, Technology Industries, Ovum. “Institutions will find that participating in this program offers many of the benefits of open source but without the inherent risks, thereby enabling the extension and consequent value of Banner and other SunGard solutions in more rapid and innovative ways.”
In the past, customers that developed custom features on their own incurred the initial cost of development as well as the ongoing expense of maintenance. There was not a secure process to share developments with others or discover whether a need had already been met by another institution’s development effort. Through the Community Source initiative, SunGard Higher Education customers can contribute to and benefit from other individual customer innovations. A customer-led board prioritizes submissions and decides which would be valuable additions to the baseline versions of SunGard Higher Education products. In contrast to a traditional open source model, new functionality will be production tested and then supported by SunGard Higher Education.
“The Community Source Initiative leverages the expertise and collaborative goodwill of our far-reaching user community to bring more and better solutions to market faster while helping ensure the quality of those solutions through structured review; and it eases the institution’s burden of continually upgrading local enhancements,” said Jack Kramer, senior vice president, client satisfaction, SunGard Higher Education. “Our Community Source initiative is another proof point of our commitment to our Open Digital Campus vision that is built on collaboration and engagement with our customers.”
“This initiative is important to Marist College and to higher education as a whole because it turbo-charges the efforts to develop quality, vendor-supported products by engaging the customer experts who use it in the field,” said Bill Thirsk, vice president of Information Technology/CIO, Marist College, and member of the SunGard Higher Education Community Source Steering Committee. “SunGard is taking a very intelligent risk with this move, and I believe it will be successful. By working directly with its customer community, SunGard is clearly telling us they trust us to co-develop the product and that they really do have our best interests in mind. While SunGard Higher Education has been a good partner in the past, this new level of trust they are showing customers is tangible proof that they are serious. I believe this is the model of the future and that SunGard's disruption of old school development cycles will be a winner. It is also interesting to see the excitement in the community about this; the number of institutions that have become involved in such a short time is impressive.”
Already, several enhancements developed by the user community have been incorporated into SunGard Higher Education’s Banner baseline solutions and there is a pipeline of enhancements that are currently being reviewed. Enhancements are reviewed by boards focused on the SunGard Higher Education Banner, PowerCAMPUS and Advance solutions. Additional review boards are being formed.
