Enterprise Resource Planning | News

Datatel Adds SaaS to Colleague ERP, Updates Managed Services

• By Dian Schaffhauser
• 10/20/11

Datatel has revised its services offerings to provide as little or as much support for its IT applications as its institutional customers want. The company, whose flagship offering, Colleague, powers enterprise operations for hundreds of universities and colleges in the country, said it now also offers that suite of applications in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

Schools can choose to work with Datatel through three new managed services:

• With the "silver" level Datatel remotely applies upgrades and updates to Datatel applications.
• With the "gold" level, the vendor remotely monitors and manages Datatel applications and supporting infrastructure.
• With the "platinum" level, Datatel provides offsite hosting and complete administration of Datatel applications and supporting infrastructure. This includes the procurement, provisioning, administration, and monitoring of all network and hardware infrastructure and operating system, database and application software.

Customers can also continue to contract with Datatel for on-campus services, including on-site support for Datatel applications and staff augmentation.

"By leveraging Datatel Managed Services, we have greatly benefited from the unmatched expertise that Datatel brings to managing its solutions while effectively addressing our in-house staffing limitations," said Vincent Zicolello, chief information officer of Hudson County Community College. Since 2009 Hudson County CC has been overhauling its student and institutional applications to integrate Colleague and related programs from Datatel.

As part of its "platinum" managed service, the company has also announced a SaaS deployment option for Colleague. With this model, customers can offload the capital expense and work of buying and running the infrastructure necessary to support Colleague.

Datatel said the SaaS deployment option provides for rapid scaling of resources to support increased service demand during peak periods, such as registration. New software features can be adopted by the customer as soon as they're made available by the company. Also, the hosting environment used by Datatel may exceed the reliability and management capabilities of a given customer's environment, thereby improving disaster recovery and operational risk.

"By choosing a fully managed SaaS solution from Datatel, we receive best-in-class performance and management while allowing our IT staff to focus on other strategic priorities," said Joe Street, director of information systems for the Institute for Shipboard Education. The Institute runs the Semester at Sea program, a ship-based college-level program.