Keith Rajecki's Weblog: Keith Rajecki's Weblog

Kuali Days VIII kicked off this morning in San Antonio with a keynote by Daniel Greenstein - Vice Provost of Academic Planning and Programs with University of California Office of the President.  Daniel shared some interesting observations about the current state of Higher Education as well as both the benefits and challenges of the Kuali community developed software solutions for Higher Education.  Most interesting was his comments regarding the greatest value of the Kuali Open Source not being that it is Open Source.  I am paraphrasing here.  So one must ask the question.  What is the real value and business benefit of the Kuali Open Source software.  Many of the founding member institutions will argue it provides a lower cost alternative to commercially distributed solutions from Oracle, SunGard, Datatel, etc.  Others argue it provides greater flexibility and integration of the education enterprise.  So do academic institutions really want to be in the business of developing administrative software? Can the cost of the migration be justified at an institutional level to achieve the desired outcomes?

These are some of the challenges facing many leaders of higher education institutions.   The answers to these questions will vary based on the organizational maturity in both administrative business processes as well as IT operations.  rSmart a Sun partner for certified Kuali distributions on the Sun Open Source technology stack has developed a program to help organizations navigate this assessment process with their Kuali Proof of Concept program.  Sun and rSmart have partnered to deploy, test, and tune the Kuali software on Sun GlassFish Suite, MySQL, and the Solaris Operating System.  Not only does this solution provide higher education with all the benefits and flexibility of open source, it provides them with a commercially supported Kuali distribution.  This reduces the software developer requirements and application support personnel among the universities and further reduces their Kuali development and support costs.