According to a recent news release, the newly created Ellucian Partner Network will collaborate on technology development, sales and marketing via its network of 150 member organizations. Those partners are listed in Ellucian’s most updated catalog, including Amazon Web Services, Barnes & Noble Education, Blackboard, National Student Clearinghouse, Oracle, PayPal, SAP and The College Board.
In an email to Government Technology, Jeff Dinski, Ellucian’s chief strategy and corporate development officer, said this initiative is not about building new tools but creating a series of integrations with companies and products already serving the higher ed market.
“One example would be transcript services, where we integrate both Parchment and National Student Clearinghouse to automate the process of a student being able to [obtain] a transcript without any manual work,” Dinski wrote.
Ellucian's brochure about the collaboration explains it as following four tracks:
- Build — These partners develop and sell cloud-based technologies that underpin or complement Ellucian's. They are also eligible to join Ellucian’s resale and referral programs.
- Sell — These partners will resell Ellucian's software tools and services to higher education institutions worldwide. Ellucian primarily uses resellers outside of North America, Dinski wrote.
- Service — These partners provide customer support and advisory services to existing Ellucian customers.
- Accelerate — This initiative is offered to a limited number of partners who demonstrate considerable contributions to Ellucian’s revenue growth. “This track is for major strategic partners where we have several different types of relationships, like AWS (Amazon Web Services),” Dinski wrote.
In addition, Dinski said, these partnerships will make data storage for universities easier and more efficient, as opposed to the method of siloing data from different departments in different locations.
“Through the Ellucian SaaS platform and our partner program and integrations, institutions will be able to utilize data in all their various technology systems from departments across the universities,” Dinski wrote.
According to the news release, 22 million students and 2,900 higher education institutions in 50 different countries use Ellucian’s software services. The functions of the company’s technology include student recruitment, enrollment, workforce retention and analytics, fundraising and alumni engagement.
“While being able to provide our software to more institutions around the world is certainly one thing the new program will help facilitate, the impetus for relaunching the latest program is to provide all our institutional customers the best possible user experience," Dinski wrote in an email. "That means creating strong integrations with a range of partners to provide the broadest and deepest platform in higher ed and providing services to help facilitate the implementation and support of that platform.”
This partner network is not the first move by Ellucian in recent years to expand its footprint through integrations with other higher ed enterprise software, as the company acquired CampusLogic in April 2022 for its financial aid processing software.
