By Marc Parry

When you download an iPhone application, you don't need to buy the entire Apple store to get what you want. When a college outsources its e-mail to Google, it doesn't have to use the company for other services.

But when a college acquires business software to handle functions like financial aid and accounting and student records, it has traditionally bought what one administrator calls "a gigantic box of stuff," even if it ends up using only a fraction of the features.

SunGard Higher Education, one of the dominant software players in the college market, now says it will open that box. The idea is to make it easier for colleges to get specific features without waiting for major upgrades. The new strategy, announced a few weeks ago at the Educause campus-technology meeting, in Denver, also provides a platform for customers to design elements that could be built into SunGard's software, contributions that could save colleges serious money. But the details remain vague, leading some skeptics to wonder if the company's words are mere hype and an attempt to compensate for a history of poor service.

At a time of tight technology budgets, these types of changes—some of which are already in place at SunGard's competitors, such as Oracle—reflect broader information-technology trends. "It's more 'buy the drink' than 'buy the fire hose,'" says Marti Harris, research director for higher education at Gartner Inc., a company that provides research and analysis of information-technology issues.

She calls SunGard's plan for greater openness "a real major move" for a company known for "pretty tight code," a shift that should make it easier to add third-party applications. But she also notes that some colleges' chief information officers have expressed doubts, saying that an upgrade is an upgrade, with plenty of issues over planning and fulfillment, even if you change the description to "rolling out features when they're ready."

If the recently announced plan proves to be substance rather than jump-on-the-openness-bandwagon marketing, though, then the changes could be broadly felt. SunGard counts 1,600 customers worldwide, including 80 percent of all U.S. research universities. They spend millions on the company's products to manage basic business functions like budgeting, human resources, registrations, and financial aid.

Underwhelming Service

The shift comes at a time of leadership change at SunGard Higher Education, with Ron M. Lang taking over as chief executive in January. College administrators who advise SunGard and use its products told The Chronicle that they welcomed the company's efforts at more openness and customer engagement, which follow what Thomas S. Danford, chief information officer for the Tennessee Board of Regents, portrays as a period of underwhelming service.

Under the company's previous management, Mr. Danford complains, it neglected to keep customers' best interests in mind, because its departments were rewarded for bringing in money for their individual units, competing with one another to sell services to their college clients.

And if you wanted to create an add-on to SunGard software? Good luck. "They had this very closed approach," says Mr. Danford, who has dealt with the company for two decades. "Lawyers at SunGard have quashed more innovation prior to Ron Lang getting there than just about anybody I can imagine."

But administrators like Mr. Danford hope that innovation could soon quicken in what SunGard calls its Community Source Initiative.

The concept is to let colleges themselves contribute program improvements and new modules. Given SunGard's large client base, it's a significant potential source of new ideas, says John A. Bielec, vice president for information resources and technology and chief information officer at Drexel University, who sits on a SunGard advisory committee. Those ideas may then be built into future software releases. Even if ideas don't pass the requirements, he says, they will still be made available in a repository for clients to use.

Most colleges that run SunGard's Banner package of applications modify the software for their needs to some degree, either by contracting with the company or doing it themselves, says Michael H. Hites, associate vice president for administrative information-technology services at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Illinois uses Banner for financial, human-resources, and student transactions—some 10 million of them a year. The software conversion to Banner cost the university system about $150-million.

The chance to unload onto SunGard the burden of supporting software modifications has the potential to save $500,000 a year, says Mr. Hites. "Right now we pay SunGard for both our Banner product—the core product—and we pay them for modifications that they wrote for us," he says. "So each one of those modifications that we can get into the community-source project and the baseline Banner is something that comes off our bill."

SunGard, too, stands to benefit.

David K. Lassner, vice president for information technology at the University of Hawaii, guesses that SunGard has already "made more money off of community-source software than any other company in the country." Its Luminis Web portal is based on uPortal software, he points out, a freely available open-source product built by the higher-education community.

"Now they're looking at how to engage in that model with their customers," says Mr. Lassner.

As for what smaller components colleges will be able to buy under SunGard's new model, the company offers few specifics at this point.

One of the examples that Darren Wesemann, SunGard's chief technology officer, does cite is a system that mines data to warn of students at risk of failing. The software was originally developed at Purdue University. Rather than forcing customers to wait until a Banner release that includes that feature, the software will be available as a stand-alone product that you can buy whether or not you are a Banner user.

Competitors on the Move

Meanwhile, one of SunGard's business-software competitors is taking a somewhat different approach.

The company, Datatel Inc., has also hitched itself to the open-source movement, through a partnership with Moodlerooms Inc, which sells services for Moodle, an open-source course-management system. The idea is to offer colleges the opportunity to combine their administrative and learning software.

So, for example, a professor entering grades, which would typically have been in the learning-management system, could now also enter data to make a case for why the student is at risk of dropping out. Previously that information would have lived in a separate system.

Elizabeth A. Murphy, chief client officer at Datatel, maintains that such a combination is cheaper and more effective. In part, she argues, that's because it frees up information-technology staff members to focus their efforts on getting the most out of the software rather than constantly working to get different systems to talk with one another.

"We've actually spent the last few years bringing more together," she says, "rather than creating disparate pieces."