Friday, November 16, 2001

Jenzabar Officials Say They Have Finished Integrating 4 Companies They Bought By FLORENCE OLSEN After buying four higher-education businesses two years ago, executives of Jenzabar Inc. say that they have all but finished consolidating the companies, which handle many colleges' financial, employee, and student records. During the consolidation, about 60 employees lost their jobs or left the company, while at least 30 new employees were hired, company executives said. "We don't enjoy reshuffling the team to put in the players we want on the field, but sometimes that's the only way you can win," said Robert A. Maginn, the chief executive officer of Jenzabar. Since January, the company has added more employees with Internet-programming skills and others with expertise in a technology area called "business intelligence," Mr. Maginn said. As have some of its competitors, Jenzabar has hired programmers to develop business-intelligence applications called data marts. Colleges would use the applications to extract useful business information from the data that they already collect and store in administrative databases. Mr. Maginn said that higher education "is behind many industries" in that colleges have so far failed to analyze much of the data they collect. He said the company initially will build 10 data marts, each tailored to key offices -- admissions, financial aid, and alumni, for example. An officer could "point and click" to extract information about the amount that any person has donated to a campaign, for example. Jenzabar executives said the company has continued to provide software support to the more than 700 colleges that use one of the five administrative-software applications that Jenzabar acquired when it bought Campus America Inc., CARS Information Systems, CMDS Inc., and the Quodata Corporation. Jenzabar had developed its own course-management and portal software before it altered course and acquired the five administrative applications. Several of those applications run on older but stable operating systems like IBM AS/400 and OpenVMS, originally developed by Digital Equipment Corporation. For those older systems, Jenzabar is continuing to issue software updates to accommodate changes in financial-aid policies and other federally mandated rules, Mr. Maginn said. Officials at the Claremont Colleges, a consortium in Claremont, Calif., said they are at least three years into a project to install new administrative systems at all five undergraduate colleges and hope to finish within 18 months. The colleges selected the CARS system before the change of ownership, but the new owner has been reassuring, said Robert Walters, associate vice president for information systems and technology at Claremont McKenna College. "We've definitely got the sense that they're fully committed," he said. Jenzabar has said it will continue to put most of its marketing and support efforts into what were originally known as the CARS and Elite systems; the company has renamed them the Jenzabar Series 300 CX and Jenzabar Series 300 EX, respectively. Both administrative-software applications run on Windows and Unix operating systems and databases from the Microsoft Corporation, the IBM Corporation, and the Hewlett Packard Company. "Jenzabar has taken the approach that it's going to provide the all-in-one, or turnkey, solution," mostly to smaller institutions, said Thomas Evans, a director and senior analyst at Eduventures.com Inc., a research firm that analyzes online-learning companies. He says the company is earning most of its revenue from the older systems that it acquired. Mr. Maginn said that much of the new programming talent at Jenzabar is being used to develop a new set of integrated administrative applications that are based on published Internet standards. The new applications will run on any Linux, Microsoft, or Unix operating system, and on any database. "If you look at the strategy of the most advanced corporate players," he added, "that's where they're going." Whether Jenzabar will succeed in wooing most of its "legacy" institutions over to the company's new integrated system remains to be seen. "The real issue for us at Claremont will be at what point do we want to migrate to a completely different system," Mr. Walters said. After completing the current administrative-systems project, should the colleges turn around and go through the same thing again -- "or do we just want to catch our breath?" Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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