Blackboard, often in the news for buying and suing rival software companies, is making nice with SunGard. The two higher-ed software giants announced on Wednesday an agreement “to deliver better integration and support services to their common customers.”
Under the deal, support and integration-services staff from both companies will be trained on each other’s products to improve customer support, among other changes, according to a news release. Blackboard has over 2,000 e-learning customers in the United States and Canada, and the company estimates that slighlty more than half also use SunGard.
For customers, “their big question has always been, ‘Well, will SunGard’s new release work with the old release that we’ve got of Blackboard, or vice versa?’” said Fred Weiss, senior vice president for product strategy at SunGard. “We will provide utmost clarity to our customers, and be working collaboratively with each other to make sure that customers are aware exactly what our plans are.”
It’s a friendly move for two companies that have largely kept away from each other’s turf, with Blackboard dominating on the course-management side and SunGard focusing on administrative software for student records and other tasks.
Blackboard’s recently resolved patent lawsuit against a course-management rival, Desire2Learn, could be seen as a move to scare off SunGard from crossing that line by acquiring Desire2Learn to compete with Blackboard, said Trace A. Urdan, a senior research analyst who tracks the education industry for Signal Hill, an investment bank. But, Mr. Urdan said, the only really big opportunity left for Blackboard to expand in its core market would be if the company decided to cross into administrative software.
In that context, this was Mr. Urdan’s take on the partnership announced Tuesday: “I don’t know that you go through all of this if you’re just about to upset the apple cart by launching some kind of rival thing. Now whether it suggests that the two companies could come together at some point—whether this is a little bit of flirtation that could lead to an actual combination—I don’t know.”
Critics have accused Blackboard of running roughshod over clients, and the company has developed a reputation for pushiness, for doing things its way, for gobbling up competitors. “They’re kind of seen as like the Darth Vader of the postsecondary IT world,” Mr. Urdan said.
“Part of the catalyst for the integration is likely the fact that Blackboard is working hard to improve its image,” he said. “While this is something that probably could have happened, and maybe should have happened, five years ago, the fact is that they’re clearly trying to become more responsive to what their customers want.”
This week’s news follows a somewhat similar tactic announced recently by Datatel Inc., one of SunGard’s business-software competitors. Datatel formed 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.
