Eduventures® Highlights Systems that Manage Student Engagement, Record Management, Student Financing and Billing, Attendance Tracking, and Class Registration and Scheduling

Boston, MA – October 4, 2019 ​

ACT® | NRCCUA®, an educational data science and research organization, announced today the publication of the Eduventures 2019 Market Analysis of Student Information Systems. This report includes analysis of products offered by companies such as Campus Management, Ellucian, Jenzabar, Oracle, Unit4, Workday, as well as additional Student Information System (SIS) vendors. Eduventures Research, ACT | NRCCUA’s research division, has based its analysis of this market segment on its annual Eduventures Higher Education Technology Landscape that categorizes the technology products used in higher education.

The Technology Landscape report has become the definitive source for rationalizing the array of technology products created to support the needs of higher education. Like other technologies included in the CollegeWide/IT Enterprise Backbone category of the landscape report, SIS provides a set of functionalities that meet a broad range of back-office and administrative requirements across multiple administrative units, faculty divisions, and students within an institution.

Eduventures defines SIS solutions as those that allow institutions to collect, store, analyze, track, and report student-level data as systems of record. The functionality of these systems includes outreach and engagement management, student record management, student financing and billing, attendance tracking, and class registration and scheduling.

Competitive Market Pressures

Currently, the SIS segment is best understood as highly competitive; there are a few primary SIS providers for institutions with high enrollments and several players attempting to carve out a niche at institutions with low enrollments that serve specific student populations.

Meanwhile, the market is slowing, as clearly evidenced by a decrease in new system implementations over recent years. This report includes a market share assessment, size and share of implementations, and historical growth rates for a range of technology providers who serve this market.

Highlighted trends in the Eduventures 2019 Market Analysis of Student Information Systems include:

1. Cloud Migration: Institutions are in varying states of readiness to migrate to hosted or cloud environments and oftentimes wedded to highly customized legacy systems and outmoded operations. Migration to the cloud has been a concentrated effort of SIS vendors. This report analyzes the longitudinal trend of on-premises and hosted/cloud SIS implementations.
2. Increased Interest in Institutional Transformation: Institutions are increasingly focused on initiatives such as digital transformation and expanding non-traditional academic models and programs (e.g., competency-based education and certificate programs) and online and hybrid programs. Many student information systems seem largely concentrated on operational concerns—tracking student records, for example—and do not appear to lend themselves to helping institutions address the more transformational concerns.
3. The Rise of CRM: Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) solutions have historically been used for marketing campaigns, recruitment, and other areas that address stakeholder engagement. As such, institutions have deployed integrations between the CRM and SIS to ensure that they captured and consolidated student data. Recently, we have seen a rise in institutions considering whether a CRM alone can address both areas by serving as the central source of student data and providing a mechanism by which institutional leaders can engage with stakeholders.

According to Michael Miller, Eduventures Senior Analyst, ACT | NRCCUA, “The SIS segment is at a crossroads. For providers to be successful, they must demonstrate the value of SIS as an asset that cannot only provide operational efficiencies, but help institutions create a platform for strategic transformation.”