From April 6-9, 2024, I attended Ellucian Live 2024, where James and I were invited as analysts. It was only my second Ellucian conference, but somehow, I felt like a veteran. I was happy to meet up with old acquaintances while making new connections in the edtech world. With this post, I want to share some of my insights about this conference.
This year’s conference was in San Antonio (Texas), a city I had never visited. As a Canadian, I was looking forward to the promised warm weather and sunshine. A few days before the conference, I left a snowy Ottawa (we were in the middle of a snowstorm when I left) to visit Austin and enjoy the Texan hospitality.
Looking back at the conference itself, what blew my mind was the vastness of the conference setup. Ellucian is one of the few education-only companies that need these large infrastructures to welcome over 6,000 participants from 30+ countries. The exhibitor lounge had over 75 sponsors/exhibitors, and the session catalog announced over 400 sessions.
Ellucian took advantage of the total solar eclipse in Texas to make it this year’s conference theme. They reserved an extended lunch timeslot for attendees to enjoy the solar eclipse with the Ellucian-themed glasses, a nice touch many attendees appreciated. Even though the weather did not completely cooperate, we managed to get a few glimpses of this amazing experience.
Ellucian Strikes Back: Direct Shots Fired at Competition
Many companies take advantage of these annual conferences to announce major projects. During Ellucian Live 2024, Ellucian focused its announcements on digital transformation and modernization, mainly around its SaaS offering. However, Ellucian did something we normally don’t see during this type of event: it took the stage to throw shade at its competition. The difficulty faced by an institution in implementing Workday Student was demonstrated by Ellucian staff, who boldly highlighted this win.
During this presentation, the audience was shown a video in which the university’s CIO explained why his institution dropped Workday Student and decided to go with Ellucian instead. And, for the rest of the conference sessions, Ellucian went the extra mile in showing the enhancements they were bringing to their HR and Finance products (to reduce the “poaching” of their clients).
Students at the Forefront
Source: Ellucian Youtube Channel
Like last year’s conference, Ellucian put students at the center of the conference. The message was clear: “Like the sun, students are the center of our universe,” mentioned Laura K. Ipsen, CEO of Ellucian, during her keynote speech on the first day of the conference. Throughout the conference, students took the stage to play music or sing a few songs. They were also interviewed during sessions to explain how Ellucian helped them better succeed in their student journey. One quote from the Day 1 highlight video summarizes Ellucian’s intention: “The more we know about our students, the more we can connect them with the right people on our campuses.”
There Is Always Room for Improvement
With an organization this big, it’s normal that not everything goes as planned. One of the comments I heard the most was about the lack of clarity around the sessions. Breakfast story: A friend of mine discussed this situation with an attendee. While enjoying the food, he mentioned one criticism of the session agenda: the sessions are not properly tagged as Banner or Colleague. This is especially true for the SaaS sessions, as many attendees assumed they were for the two products. Attendees got frustrated when, after ten minutes in a session, they were told that the session was not for their institution’s product.
Ellucian could improve the attendees’ experience by simply adding a stream in the session catalog. It would be helpful to know which sessions are targeted at Colleague and which are aimed at Banner. Ellucian could even push this idea to the next level by placing Colleague sessions in one section of the convention center and Banner sessions in another area to avoid confusion.
Artificial Intelligence Is Still on Everyone’s Lips
During Ellucian Live 2024, I learned that Ellucian is not working on a large language model (LLM) and that it opted to use GPT-4 instead. This trend is seen across many solution providers because it reduces costs by buying a tested and over-tested product like Amazon, Facebook, Google, or ChatGPT instead of spending recurring money to develop and maintain such a system. Solution providers must focus on delivering value to their customers; Ellucian understands this.
During one of the keynotes, the topic of security was central to a discussion with students. I was surprised at how the students these days are navigating security challenges with ease. Throughout America, student clubs are formed to find new ways to secure systems, and hackathons are organized to further their knowledge on this crucial topic. We all heard stories of competition winners being offered jobs on the spot by big corporations. I feel old when I see how students can navigate these situations. In my opinion, this is one of the highlights of the conference.
The Cloud Is at the Heart of Discussions
Along with other analysts invited to the conference, I got to speak with three institutions that have moved to the cloud (or are in the process of doing so). These three institutions are not considered big universities/colleges and have decided to move to the Ellucian cloud, mainly because of the security aspect and potential savings (or better resource allocation). Ellucian allowed us to ask all the questions we wanted and did not intervene when we asked spicier questions. The institutions mentioned exploring other cloud solutions during the process but that the Ellucian SIS products tipped the scales in Ellucian’s favor.
According to our database, Ellucian has been slower in transitioning to the cloud than the other big players. During Ellucian Live 2024, the executive team was extremely happy to announce that 79 institutions had either moved to the cloud (from an on-premise implementation) or implemented one of Ellucian’s cloud solutions in 2023. That’s impressive compared to the previous years of gathered data.
Ellucian Live in a Nutshell
Over the years, Ellucian has proven that a strong SIS is key to controlling daily operations in education. When I started as an IT Manager, one of my colleagues told me that all campus systems try to connect directly or indirectly to the SIS. If you have a good system, your job will go smoothly. Looking retrospectively at Ellucian Live 2024, Ellucian showed that it works to offer the best SIS possible to its clients with the vision of remaining a big player in the HigherEd SIS market.
When we zoom in on the conference and its content, I think the keynotes, even if some were long, were generally well-produced, rehearsed, and well-executed. Yet, I witnessed some prosaic presentations delivered by Ellucian staff where they implied that moving to SaaS is easy. This statement does not represent the reality of many institutions when it usually takes years to migrate to the cloud.
Also, some presentations lacked preparation. It’s okay to have conventional talks when institution representatives are invited to take the stage, but we should expect a higher level of quality from Ellucian employees. This is their most important event of the year, so taking the time to review their presentation decks before talking in front of hundreds of clients is vital.
Overall, this conference has been a great opportunity to meet with Ellucian representatives and clients and to get an overview of what to expect from this company’s future. I am already looking forward to attending next year’s event.
Note: Ellucian paid part of my expenses to attend this conference and is a portal subscriber.
