Melbourne university chooses Jade

By ADAM GIFFORD

Christchurch software firm Jade has won its first customer in the Australian higher education market, selling a student management system (SMS) to Swinburne University in Melbourne in a deal which could be worth up to $10 million.

Sarah Davies, Swinburne vice-president for student affairs, said Jade's software was the only commercially available package which worked for both the university and Tafe sectors, the Australian term for polytechnics.

"Other packages say they do, but our experience when we have gone to look is Jade is the only one operating in technical colleges and in universities," Davies said.

Waikato University, Manukau Institute of Technology, Christchurch and Otago polytechnics all use Jade SMS and it is being implemented at Canterbury University.

Tafe qualifications are based on contact hours and competency assessments, meaning they can be extremely complex. Swinburne has about 15,000 students doing full- time university courses and 30,000 people doing Tafe study at multiple campuses.

"We wanted one solution which worked across the system because we have meshed programmes and dual awards," Davies said.

It is the first major software sale in the Victorian tertiary sector since 2001, when the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology spent A$47 million ($50.57 million) on a failed implementation of a PeopleSoft student administration system.

Davies said Swinburne took note of the RMIT experience and proceeded cautiously, including having an independent review of the procurement process once it had made its decision.

While the Jade SMS should be working by March 2006, Swinburne will keep its 12-year-old custom-built Ascol system running in parallel until February 2007 in case any problems emerge.

While the price was not disclosed, a benchmark could be Waikato, which expects to spend $4 million over five years for its system.

Swinburne could spend more than double that because of its larger size and the amount of work which will be required building the business rules into the system, but Davies said the price would be "nowhere like" the A$65 million Queensland University is currently spending on a PeopleSoft implementation.

Davies said Jade would allow Swinburne to replace at least six major databases and more than a dozen minor ones which had evolved to handle issues outside of the Ascol system.

"From a student perspective, Jade will provide a complete web interface, so they will be able to enrol and register for courses online.

"The student portal will be up by December so they will be able to control their academic lives, setting up timetables and planning course structures."


Davies said Jade SMS acted as a case management system which tracked students' academic progress.

"We will be able to plot features of students at risk, so the system can identify patterns and behaviours so we may be able to intervene earlier with support."

Jade chief executive Rod Carr said the sale opened up a significant market across the Tasman.

"We understand a lot of organisations deferred making a decision because they wanted to see what happened at Swinburne, who have been working through this procurement process for the past two and a half years," he said.