Monday, January 14, 2002

SCT to Buy Sallie Mae's Software Arm By FLORENCE OLSEN The SCT Corporation announced on Friday that it will pay about $15.5-million to buy Sallie Mae's Student Information Systems Business. Assets included in the deal include two software packages -- the Exeter Student Suite and Campus Loan Manager -- that complement SCT's own Banner and Plus software. Sallie Mae, the nation's largest financer and manager of student loans, decided to sell the assets just two years after getting into the software business, said Jim Boyle, vice president of corporate communications. Customers for the student-information software are generally "people who are overseeing the information-technology needs on college campuses, whereas our primary constituency on campus is the financial-aid officer," Mr. Boyle said. Sallie Mae's core business is managing $72-billion in student loans. SCT was especially interested in components of the Exeter Student Suite that manage student recruiting and admissions, said Robert L. Moul, president of SCT's global education-solutions group. SCT plans to add those and other parts of the software it acquired to its own student system. The acquisition also gives SCT a student system that works with either a Microsoft or an Oracle database. Before the acquisition, SCT could offer only an Oracle-based student system. Sallie Mae had sold its Exeter Student Suite to only 65 institutions, but many of them are prestigious research universities, such as the Harvard Business School, Texas A&M University, and the University of Chicago. Sallie Mae's Campus Loan Manager is used by 106 institutions. Eduventures Inc., a consulting group specializing in education businesses, says the sale will help SCT expand its market share beyond mid-sized institutions, where SCT has been most successful. As student-information systems become more complex and better integrated with online-learning systems, said Sean Robert Gallagher, an Eduventures analyst, research universities may increasingly find it more appealing "to buy instead of build." Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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