Oracle has announced several major investments in its higher education solutions – including a new Oracle Student Cloud and new higher education functionality delivered in Oracle Human Capital Management (HCM) Cloud and Oracle ERP Cloud, all part of Oracle Cloud. Oracle will also deliver a new release of its flagship PeopleSoft Campus Solutions suite.
As the higher education industry moves toward flexible deployment models for administrative systems, Oracle will offer its customers flexibility and choice – backed by extensive experience in and commitment to the industry.
Oracle’s offerings will enable institutions to run their student and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems on premise or to migrate to a cloud-based deployment when it makes sense for their organisation.
Oracle will offer Oracle Student Cloud to meet the needs of customers who are transforming their institutions to support configurable standard business processes and to free up IT resources for mission-critical activities in learning, teaching and research.
Part of the Oracle Education and Research Cloud, the Oracle Student Cloud will:
* Include flexible core structures and extensible architecture to manage a variety of traditional and non-traditional educational offerings.
* Feature a dynamic user interface that promotes engagement and collaboration.
* Support the core capabilities of enrolment, payment and assessment in the product’s first phase, targeted for calendar year 2015.
* Leverage the support of Oracle’s customer design partners in defining solution capabilities through each delivery phase – building a comprehensive student information system for the cloud.
Oracle plans to offer higher education-specific functionality in Oracle Human HCM Cloud and Oracle ERP Cloud in calendar years 2014 and 2015. The solutions will incorporate the best capabilities from Oracle’s existing product lines and enhance them with new mobile, social and analytic features to improve productivity.
These planned enhancements will:
* Provide support for Position Control Multiple Appointments, Collective Bargaining Agreements, Grants Management, Budgetary Control and Encumbrance Accounting.
* Integrate with the new Oracle Student Cloud offering.
Finally, as part of this commitment, Oracle will offer a new PeopleSoft Campus Solutions release to provide a simpler, more productive user experience and a more efficient application lifecycle management process. The new release, planned for calendar year 2015, will:
* Build on the framework of a proven, mature product with more than a decade of innovative features.
* Include a roll-up of all new functionality – including 21 major new features and 48 significant enhancements – delivered since the release of PeopleSoft Campus Solutions 9.0 through the Continuous Delivery Model, which provides periodic application bundles in between major application releases.
* Leverage significant enhancements in PeopleTools to provide students with simpler self-service capability and institutions with a more modern, streamlined application maintenance process.
“Today’s higher education institutions – from traditional research institutions to non-traditional continuing education programs – have unique challenges but a shared focus on operational excellence and student success.
“Oracle is dedicated to providing our customers in this exciting industry with flexible technology options – through significant investments in the creation of a Higher Education Cloud, complete with Oracle Student Cloud and higher education functionality in our cloud-based HR and ERP applications, as well as a new release of our flagship PeopleSoft Campus Solutions suite.
“Oracle is an industry leader in offering this level of long-term commitment to choice and stability for higher education customers’ core administrative systems,” said Mark Armstrong, vice president, higher education product development, Oracle.
