Ellucian On-Trend with CampusLogic Acquisition

By acquiring CampusLogic, Ellucian has made a solid addition to its portfolio, bringing significant potential benefits to its customers. The acquisition adds product assets to augment current offerings and architectural assets to provide technology and staffing to accelerate Ellucian’s transition to SaaS. The move is interesting but not surprising.

Ellucian has long been a market leader with mature, customizable on-premises solutions. However, their core products are aging and lack the seamless modern user experience of CampusLogic. The acquisition—which moves Ellucian towards fully modern UI and expands SaaS architecture around core Banner and Colleague product lines—appears to signal a desire to compete directly with Oracle and Workday.

The acquisition presents opportunity and risk for changing the corporate culture and integrating the technology into the Ellucian ecosystem. One significant challenge may be building a culture where acquired products and newly-joined product teams can influence existing product teams and leadership—not a minor concern for an organization that does not acquire companies frequently.

Higher education is seeking robust, modern solutions across virtually every area, but financial aid is a critical point of interest. Financial aid and enrollment solutions are the first points of potential student interaction and, as such, are a cornerstone of institutional technology infrastructure. Tuition revenue is a crucial driver of their operating budget for most institutions. However, many institutions are experiencing the pressure of limited resources and stringent compliance requirements. They recognize the critical role of financial aid in student retention and revenue generation.

Over the last few years, Tambellini has observed a decline in the financial aid resources and knowledge at some smaller institutions. All to say that higher education needs better solutions to compensate for the lack of institutional staffing of financial aid offices. CampusLogic offers student-facing SaaS solutions that support fundraising, scholarship management, and improved navigation through complex financial aid and institutional workflows. These modern products complement Ellucian’s core transactional systems and align with Ellucian’s move towards SaaS.

For Ellucian, we observe a clear influence of the private equity partners Blackstone (NYSE: BX) (“Blackstone”) and Vista Equity Partners (“Vista”). Recently, Vista has focused on EdTech acquisitions and trended towards rapid horizontal acquisition patterns. The CampusLogic acquisition represents a shift away from Ellucian’s use of partnerships to expand functional breadth, an approach that resulted in complex contractual agreements, multiple user interfaces, and disparate system administration platforms for institutions. With this transaction, Ellucian extends its current financial aid technology solutions, helping higher education institutions improve enrollment and completion outcomes. The combined offerings will better support critical student needs—discovering, applying, and securing financial resources from pre-enrollment to post-credential. However, Ellucian will achieve this goal only if the technical integration of these products results in a seamless experience for students, administrators, and IT departments. We will be watching how Ellucian leadership, product, and sales teams evolve and respond to CampusLogic influence. The many institutions and students that Ellucian serves should also pay close attention to how this acquisition—once closed—impacts the company they’ve counted on for decades.