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Features
Business of IT >> More Than Money
6/27/2005
www.sct.com) and WebCT (www.webct.com) for several other colleges and universities, under license from the respective software providers, charging fees to the users for access. “We also host the complete suite of SAP (www.sap.com) products here,” says Bielec, “purely for academic use. Professors at 17 different colleges and universities around the US, and in the UK and Russia, access our SAP modules for their teaching. Revenues for this third component come directly from SAP, which is responsible for signing up the subscriber universities.”At Dakota State University (SD), “We had already been providing ASP hosting for our local K-12 system for awhile,” reports John Webster, the university’s director of the Center for Remote Enterprise System Hosting (CRESH). “Then PeopleSoft (now part of Oracle; www.peoplesoft.com) asked us if we could take on more, to serve as an ASP for other schools. One of PeopleSoft’s senior people drew a diagram of a proposed business relationship on a tablecloth over dinner, and asked if I thought we could deliver. I said we could, and we did.” The relationship with PeopleSoft began with HR and financial systems, and was in operation in about six months. A similar relationship with Microsoft (www.microsoft.com) came later, Webster reports.
IT services as developer. At Georgia Southern University, different factors came together to create a new kind of opportunity for that institution. Jim Bradford, dean of the school’s College of Information Technology, remembers: “A vice president at NCR (www.ncr.com) had previously worked on a research project with one of GSU’s department heads, so we had an existing link. At the same time, NCR was assessing one of its products that was getting pretty long in the tooth, and determined that it needed significant updates and extensions, but its development staff was heavily committed to other projects. One of the ideas that quickly moved to the top of the list was to work with a university to redevelop the product.” As luck would have it, the state of Georgia was also exploring economic development options for the region at that time. “We applied for, and received, a state grant to help develop intellectual property options to improve the area economically, and used the grant to hire a professional project manager from the [IT] industry. NCR donated the source code rights to the university as a tax-deductible, in-kind donation worth about $2.7 million dollars, which was a critical point in helping us get the state grant,” says Bradford.
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