MALVERN, Pa, October 28, 2009 — SunGard Higher Education today announced a new hosted delivery option for PowerCAMPUS that will help small- to mid-sized institutions of higher education eliminate the burden of managing and maintaining administrative software.
The new delivery method is part of SunGard Higher Education’s recently announced Open Digital Campus strategy, providing colleges, universities and foundations with new flexibility to shape how technology meets their evolving needs.
“Our customers are asking for more flexible options in building, deploying and managing their digital campuses, and we are responding with the Open Digital Campus strategy,” said Darren Wesemann, chief product officer and chief technology officer at SunGard Higher Education. “Budget constraints and technology advances spur new creative approaches. Hosting provides a new alternative for institutions of higher education that want access to a high-availability environment to meet institutional goals with limited resources and at a predictable cost.”
With this new solution, customers now have options in deploying PowerCAMPUS, an administrative solution built on Microsoft technologies. Whether managing it themselves on campus or having it managed for them remotely by SunGard Higher Education experts, institutions can choose whichever delivery method is most suitable for their needs.
PowerCAMPUS Hosting provides a complete package including operating system, database and application administration management, incident management resolution, 24/7 support and licenses and hardware for PowerCAMPUS.
Campus leaders are continually working to redirect scarce resources to their core teaching and learning missions, finding more flexible and cost-effective ways to meet their IT needs. With PowerCAMPUS Hosting, SunGard Higher Education manages and maintains the hardware, system infrastructure and enterprise applications at a cost that can either be subscription-based or licensed. SunGard Higher Education can provide a customized implementation focused on an accelerated timeframe, and then manage all upgrades and patches, leaving campus IT staff to redirect efforts toward other mission-critical activities.
Data from the annual Campus Computing Survey point to rising campus interest in hosted and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions for key enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications and services. “We know that many campuses are using hosted and SaaS solutions for some newer ERP technologies such as customer relationship management and learning management systems applications,” said Kenneth Green, founding director of The Campus Computing Project, the nation’s largest continuing study of information technology in higher education.
“Continuing budget pressures are a clear catalyst for colleges and universities to explore hosted and SaaS options. Further, campus IT officials are watching carefully the migration to hosted and SaaS solutions in other sectors and the experience of the early adopters in higher education as part of their efforts to assess the appropriateness of hosted solutions for their institutions.”
Key components that comprise the PowerCAMPUS Hosting service include an Internet data center to host customer applications; Internet connectivity with bandwidth availability as high as 100MB; reliable network security from dual redundant firewalls and a fully segmented network infrastructure; proven backup and recovery methods; and all hardware including servers and storage.
Additionally, PowerCAMPUS Hosting helps provide consistent and reliable access to up-to-date hardware and applications. With documented levels of support, institutions can be confident in the dependability of the solution. Using the industry standard J2EE framework helps enable integration with other popular user interface technologies.
About SunGard Higher Education
SunGard Higher Education serves colleges, universities and foundations in 40 countries worldwide. Through its Open Digital Campus strategy, SunGard collaborates with the higher education community and provides software and services to help institutions find better ways to teach, learn, manage and connect. To learn more, please visit www.sungardhe.com [1].
About SunGard
SunGard is one of the world’s leading software and IT services companies. SunGard serves more than 25,000 customers in more than 70 countries.
SunGard provides software and processing solutions for financial services, higher education and the public sector. SunGard also provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software.
With annual revenue exceeding $5 billion, SunGard is ranked 435 on the Fortune 500 and is the largest privately held business software and services company on the Forbes list of private businesses. Based on information compiled by Datamonitor*, SunGard is the third largest provider of business applications software after Oracle and SAP. Continuity, Insurance & Risk has recognized SunGard as service provider of the year an unprecedented six times. For more information, please visit SunGard at www.sungard.com [2].
*January 2009 Technology Vendors Financial Database Tracker http://www.datamonitor.com [3]
Trademark information: SunGard, the SunGard logo and PowerCAMPUS are trademarks or registered trademarks of SunGard Data Systems Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. All other trade names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.