Education Software Solutions tells school customers: We are moving to 3-year licensing contracts and so are you Education Software Solutions – a one-time Capita-owned school software provider now under the control of Montagu Private Equity – is being marked down by customers for moving to minimum three-year licensing contracts. Sold in December for £400m, ESS has become part of the same group as ParentPay, run by CEO Mark Brant, who …
I am sure my Business Manager might be a trifle miffed at this development... Icon represents her probable reaction.
SIMS is, currently, a steaming pile of ordure; each time you use it you are reminded just how fresh that excrement is!
It has seen virtually no development since inception - Crapita (now ESS) preferring to milk thier bond slaves for every penny in their budgets rather than develop a useable, modern application.
Hey ho - interesting times!
I know of two school IT managers that LOVE this news because it does trigger a competitive tender. They hate sims and this is a great way to get rid of it. There are plenty of other MIS providers now and a great many know how to extract data efficiently for a transfer.
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>>if you want to tank a product
Looking at the state of SIMS now this may well be ESS master plan.
It will probably cost so much to undo years of bodges and refactor it into something useable(?) and maintainable that it will be cheaper to scrap it and replace with something else. Forcing the 3 year commitment may(unlikely but a bean counter might consider the proposition) raise enough capital to fund said redo from start + data migration tools....
more likely thats what they will claim will happen (indeed are with their jam tomorrow promises) but the reality will be SIMS festering for another 10 years till they get the bottle to scrap it with no migration plan (much easier when there are fewer schools around to complain).
Sims is an awfully outdated product. Some of it is still based on Pascal and Dbase I believe!!
It makes you wonder why they didn't just start again with a modern framework but they seem to have built on top of the legacy code over and over again to the point where it is impossible to upgrade.
Our school moved away from Sims years ago, we saw this coming.
This is what gets me - that anybody could ever look at a supplier and say "hmmm, formerly owned by capita, now owned by private equity firm........ yes I think I'll sign a contract with them as I'm sure it'll be excellent value and nothing will go wrong..............."
And not forgetting, of course, that the company is now saddled with the purchase price as debt. At least while Crapita owned it, it was just running costs plus profit. Now it's running costs plus ROI on purchase + profits. No wonder they're trying to strong-arm their customers into 3 year contracts!
The real problem is the cost of changing to a new system. The legacy data on thousands of students and staff will require to be imported into the new database. SIMS is mostly undocumented from a user point of view, you used to need a developer licence to access the complete database.
I guess RM will collect quite a few SIMS leavers, if you have to have a three year contract, it will make most institutions look at the alternatives, far more than the usual cursory look, and worry about the retraining costs, data transfer costs. Though SIMS is a bit crap, it's the crap every member of staff has to know at some level or another. Many schools use the add on modules for Timetabling, parent communications,registers,rewards,discipline,staff appraisals,catering and Wisepay etc.
It will be interesting to see how many schools jump ship, though I'm sure migration will be a very expensive pain in the arse.
One of the better aspects of SIMS was the training department, pity most of the experienced trainers were made redundant for the sale.
"It will be interesting to see how many schools jump ship, though I'm sure migration will be a very expensive pain in the arse."
I do hope El Reg will keep on top of this story with respect to a possible climb down, and if not, re-visit it over the coming 6-12 months and see how their market share changes.
The real problem is the cost of changing to a new system. The legacy data on thousands of students and staff will require to be imported into the new database. SIMS is mostly undocumented from a user point of view, you used to need a developer licence to access the complete database.
I guess RM will collect quite a few SIMS leavers, if you have to have a three year contract, it will make most institutions look at the alternatives, far more than the usual cursory look, and worry about the retraining costs, data transfer costs. Though SIMS is a bit crap, it's the crap every member of staff has to know at some level or another. Many schools use the add on modules for Timetabling, parent communications,registers,rewards,discipline,staff appraisals,catering and Wisepay etc.
It will be interesting to see how many schools jump ship, though I'm sure migration will be a very expensive pain in the arse.
One of the better aspects of SIMS was the training department, pity most of the experienced trainers were made redundant for the sale.
Isams and bromcom transfer fine. I know, ive done it on both. Because it is sims the smaller compa ies need to have robust transfers else noone will do it.
The main cost is 3rd party integrations, isams and bromcom use different API methods. These days a lot of 3rd party stuff use abominations such as wonde though.
In some other universe...
For the good of the people they represent, the Government encourages development of an open source application for use by any school system that wishes to use it to meet the regulatory/compliance mandates created by said Government. The Government supplies the specs and manages the code while people with an interest in spending their tax dollars on actual education instead of overpriced administrative software contribute their time and talent. Let university students earn credit by participating in working through the bug fix/enhancement lists.
As I said, in some other universe.
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