Re: List of Universities Using Oracle

>
> According to conventional wisdom, Banner will never be suitable
> for larger Universities. Part of the this is supposedly because
> of SCT's merger with the ugly but stable Cobol-VSAM IA/SIS+
> (Information Associates/Student Information System). We have SIS+
> and other IA modules on our campus mainframe here, and use Focus
> batch reporting (which from the viewpoint of a humble PC LAN Oracle
> programmer, stinks mightily).
>

There are some fairly large schools using Banner. I've always thought that the application itself was more suited to larger schools than places our size (1300 students). We, the small schools, represent a growing, but still small part of SCT's business. Datatel has typically been one of the choice systems for small schools partly because of the perceived maintenance cost (staff/$) of Banner on Oracle - Colleague on PICK is sold as a system with alot lower resource cost which is probably correct. I believe, however, that SCT has cut into Datatel's market pretty severely in the past couple of years. This is my perception from our recent (last spring) selection process - could be wrong, though, so I won't argue this point with anyone.

> On the other hand, Oracle might see an opening in the "big"
> University SQL application market for the same reasons. Or
> maybe there are just lots of unhappy Banner customers that
> Oracle thinks it can can ambush? I remember somethings about
> some Banner platforms that are still only supported on
> Forms 2.3, or was it Forms 3?

The cost to develop a specialized competitor to Banner would be quite high for the fairly limited market. Too high, I think. I would expect that Oracle is going to be more intent on trying to whittle away at SAPs share in the applications market than chasing after the educational market. If Oracle were to go after education, I would bet they would purchase either SCT (who also has products for government and utilities) or Datatel (who has expressed a desire to move from the PICK platform and is privately owned and not exactly burning up the charts with new sales). Then Oracle would be fighting against a large Oracle customer with an application suite they aren't exactly known for. I don't think it will happen, but Oracle does have deep pockets.

As to SCT's product, it isn't "old" as I see it. We are implementing Banner 2.1.x in a Macintosh Client/Server environment running the latest version of FORMS available for the Mac - 4.0.x. We could, once the product is available, regenerate the Banner forms for Oracle FORMS 4.5 and, from what people tell us, run the system that way. There are too many forms to regenerate for us to bother until SCT makes the upgrade - constrained by the need to support character-mode customers, I understand.

If there are SCT sites on older systems, it is their choice, not SCT's unless Oracle doesn't offer later versions for the particular platform. I don't exactly know.

Anyway, just some comments.

Glenn Stauffer
DBA
Swarthmore College Received on Fri Jan 19 1996 - 08:54:25 CST