Re: List of Universities Using Oracle

Mr. Peterson,

Thanks for the feedback, I'm glad to hear that some large campuses are finding the current Banner software workable. Are they able to tie automated telephone class registration in?

re:
> Date sent: Thu, 18 Jan 1996 18:13:01 -0700
> From: JOHN PETERSON <ADP_JOHN_at_WESTERN.EDU>
> Subject: Re: List of Universities Using Oracle
> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
 <ORACLE-L_at_ccvm.sunysb.edu>

> BXR,
> I don't work for SCT but I'm curious about conventional wisdom that Banner
> will never be suitable for large universities. It is my understanding that
> some very large University Systems on both Coast, the Heartland and the
> Gulf Coast area are indeed in Production with Banner, that Forms 2.3 has
> givern way to Forms 3.0 and these will give way to Forms 4.0 and beyond.
> SCT has a home page something like http://www.sctcorp.com/ with more
> details.

When the 20+ campus Cal State University system was making a decision to convert to a standardized student/admin data processing system across many of the campuses about 5 years ago, SCT hadn't merged IA yet. At the time, the "powers that be" were still sceptical about the stability of products (like Banner) implemented on SQL databases and IBM was still king of the hill. Reportedly, everyone was saying that there were NO stable Banner implementations at campuses with student populations of 25,000 or more. As a result, the remaining choice was IA's Cobol/VSAM products (including SIS+).

Needless to say, all the VAX and PC/LAN computer people here felt like barfing when they were told they had to retrain on IBM, especially using an "obsolete" technology like Cobol/VSAM/MVS!

I still suspect that there were some political shenanigans going on with state politics and the funding of DP projects, and that a big computer company may have put political pressure on the decision makers (republican appointees) to select software that required lots of expensive IBM hardware. Thus a possible explanation for the origins of the "myth"/conventional wisdom about Banner being wimpy.

Of course SCT bought IA a couple of years later, and I have no idea how that plays into the picture.

> Big iron may not be dead and gone, millions of line of code remain in
> production across our land, but I wouldn't be looking for that to expand as
> fast as multi-processor and 64-bit Alpha systems capable of handling huge
> Oracle databases. I think Banner is a strong solution for small to large
> Higher Ed. Administrative Systems, some technology crossover is bound to
> happen between IA and Banner solutions that will probally benefits both
> user bases.

Unfortunately, this campus is stuck with IA stuff. It has taken almost 5 years to complete most of the conversion from the hodge podge of preexisting systems, and mods are still ongoing (automated analysis of student history to assist academic advising). No one is going to be happy to go through another conversion from Cobol/VSAM to SQL unless the conversion is pretty transparent (ha ha ha). Making a few SQL programmers, data analysts and institutional researchers (who want distributed processing) happy by converting to Banner/Oracle is not a sufficient reason to convert. As long as the day-to-day/mission-critical IA stuff keeps working, people will want to keep using it even if it is clunky and somewhat limited.

...snip
> >
> I would presume some of Oracle Corp. Applications are being looked at by
> Higher Ed.
> such as Financials, etc.

Good point.

>
> John
>

So, shall we conclude that Oracle is probably NOT going to try to sell software to compete with SCT in the "core" student records/ financial-aid area of higher ed administrative DP?

BXR Received on Fri Jan 19 1996 - 14:22:04 CST