COVER STORY: Enterprise Systems: Risky Business?

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COVER STORY: Enterprise Systems: Risky Business?

9/23/2005

By John Savarese

That search led them, in December 2004, to a contract with SAP (www.sap.com/usa/industries/highered), one of the few administrative system vendors in the higher education market that has not gone through a change of ownership recently. Northern Kentucky is in the early stages of an implementation of the entire higher ed SAP suite, including mySAP, campus management, financials, human resources, Web portal, and business data warehouse.and would be in it for the long term,” says Reed. SAP’s huge presence in the global commercial market was reassuring, even if it included a relatively small presence in higher education. Reed was not worried that SAP would fail to make a go of it in higher education and leave the sector. “SAP has an excellent track record in other industries,” notes Reed. “We couldn’t find any instances of an industry that SAP entered that they had walked away from.”

The quality of the partnership with higher education clients was as important to Reed as their sheer number. Northern Kentucky did extensive reference checking and was satisfied that SAP paid close attention to its higher education user group. “Working with SAP was just the reverse of what we expected,” says Reed. “Even though they’re a large, global software provider, being part of a relatively smaller group of higher education clients allowed us to feel that our voice would be heard. Working with SAP’s higher ed group feels like working with a smaller company where everyone is accessible, including the product development staff.”

Although SAP puts heavy emphasis on the excellence of its technology platform, the company also stresses its success in forging partnerships with higher education. Malcolm Woodfield, director of Global Business Development of Higher Education & Research at SAP AG, thinks that institutions should find out what potential vendors mean when they say “partnership.” “Ask your vendor for examples that show where the company has partnered with universities, and what the results have been,” he suggests. He points to SAP’s work with the C'eus project as an example. MIT developed the C'eus grants management software and then licensed it to a consortium. SAP is part of the consortium and had integrated C'eus into its grants management module, but MIT retains the intellectual property rights. SAP, its customers, and the members of the consortium have all benefited.

Assess Relationship vs. Market Share

When Spoon River College (IL) selected Jenzabar (www.jenzabar.com) as its application provider, the school knew that few of its Illinois community college peers were using the same software. In fact, Jenzabar was added to the selection list as a backup, in case it turned out that the college couldn’t afford one of the products that dominated their market. “It says a lot that Jenzabar came from behind in our selection, because they were originally our Plan B,” says CIO Diann Jabusch.

The deciding factor was the solidity of the relationship that Jenzabar offered. Brett Stoller, the college’s VP for Administrative Services, says, “As a small college, we get thrown to the side a lot, but Jenzabar wanted to be our partner for the long term. They looked at what we wanted to do now and in the future.”