I went to yet another SunGard (the software vendor for Banner) Executive Summit in Las Vegas from the 24-26th March (yes, a weekend included!) and yes, predictably, I was very disappointed. If you remember, I wrote about my last year experience at this event (again, very disappointed) in a blog post. So, you might ask why did I choose to go there this time around. It all had to do with the fact that we recently renewed our license for Banner and recently SunGard and another competitor Datatel merged. I wanted to find out what exactly this means to us. I am very familiar with Datatel, what its strengths & weaknesses are, so I was genuinely interested in knowing if the new entity’s plans are to pick the strengths of each product to produce a new one.

We did not hear much of anything on the merger nor did we hear much in the way of current product timelines. It was not just me! Some other CIOs, especially from small liberal arts colleges, who generally don’t come to the Summit came along for the same reasons I did and many expressed the same frustrations. Because no agenda is published ahead of time when you need to register, it is very hard to know what is going to happen in this gathering. I registered simply based on hope! I left early on Monday morning before the big announcement – that the combined entity will be called Ellucian. I talked to a few others who went to the Summit from Wellesley to see if they gained any new insight about the merger and product direction and the answer was No.

A few of us were able to talk to the new CEO of the merged company, John Speer, who comes from the Datatel side. We spent considerable amount of time with him and finally a SunGard employee had to come and take him away from us so he could be shared with the other attendees! It was a revealing conversation. Bottom line – it is exactly what we I have heard before “We hear you. Banner has a lot of issues that requires us to pay attention..” etc. etc.

We asked him how he plans to fix this. He was very frank and said that they are exploring ways to solve the known problems. One of the options is to do a major overhaul of the software itself. I asked him two followup questions “How much would it cost?” and “We all are suffering from financial issues and are unlikely to be able to fund this new initiative. We also know that the market for this software is saturated, so you are unlikely to get new customers. So where does this money come from?” His answers were, the cost in his mind is around $100 million dollars. He realizes the issues around saturation and financial implications within the US.

He then went on to say how the US typically has been the technology leader which many other countries in the world follow. He therefore feels that this new money has to come from developing countries such as China, Brazil and India. I had many follow up questions – one regarding the financials and one regarding the product development strategy. In terms of the financial question what comes first? Wait for international buy in first, or invest in the future first with the hope that there will be buy in.

In terms of product development strategy I have a lot of concerns. I will keep it simple. The reason why these monstrous systems are broken has to do with the fact that they are essentially patchworks. The original core has remained and these companies simply add layers after layers on top of existing software. It is understandable why this is done – mainly for compatibility. Every institution invests enormous resources to keep these systems going and changing what is underneath will result in crippling effects for everyone. Secondly, these software tend to take a generalist approach. In other words, the same product is sold to a wide rangle of Higher Eds from large community college systems and Universities to small liberal arts colleges. We know that not everyone conducts their businesses the same way. But these software require us to change our business processes to suit what the software delivers.

I am a firm believer in frameworks and modular approach in software development for this precise reason. The reason why Moodle or Drupal are gaining momentum is precisely for these reasons. Blackboard or a web content management like  Bluenog suffer from the same issues that Banner or PeopleSoft faces. The broader that you want to appeal, the more restricting you appear to the end users. I requested John that if he is serious about a rewrite, he should really be thinking about a modular approach to the software. Banner or whatever the new software is to be called, simply becomes a framework and each of us will have a palette of  options to choose from that plugs into the framework. Of course, I realize that these are much easier to say than actually do. But, if we don’t challenge the status quo, we will never make progress.

I am not going to the Executive Summit in the near future! The speakers were uninspiring & had no clear answers to questions. I was told that the value of going to Summit is networking. I am sorry, I have plenty of opportunities to network with my colleagues. I really don’t need SunGard to arrange this for me on my dime.

There were some positives – a talk by Steve Achor on Happiness Advantage. It was an interesting talk. You can get a sense of what it was all about here. I had a chance to catch up with several colleagues. The new company will also launch an initiative to support other database systems. If and when this becomes a reality, it will be huge. The cost differential between SQLServer and Oracle is significant. We have to wait and see what the strategy here is. To top it all, I won some good money in the slot machines!