Evisions Conference 2024–Expanding Support for SaaS

I love connecting with the higher education technology community where the rubber meets the road. At the 2024 Evisions Conference in San Antonio, the Evisions team brought forward-looking support for their largely Ellucian-based clients. As Ellucian continues its push to SaaS, Evisions is supporting its customer base with continued investment in enhancements to facilitate its clients’ journey to SaaS.

While conference attendees showed that modernization to the cloud is well underway, many have not yet begun in earnest:

Given Evision’s Ellucian partnership and the fact that the majority of its current customer base is Ellucian customers, the path to SaaS for these customers is largely the path of Ellucian SaaS. As such, Evisions has definitively declared its support for that journey by committing to meet customers where they are.

Evision’s most significant investment is the redesign of the Argos Web Viewer to support hybrid data and the delivery of data and analytics to a fully mobile workforce.

Based on conversations with Tambellini Group customers, it’s clear that the process of moving to the cloud is arduous and complex for practitioners. The Evisions product team and conference attendees further validated this sentiment, which I spoke to in my conference keynote presentation, The Cloud Transition—Complexity in Pursuit of Simplicity. A move to the cloud requires focused attention to the people, process, data, and technology needed to improve institutional outcomes. Despite this complexity, movement to the cloud is progressing.

Conference Attendees Share Risks of Moving to the Cloud

Attendees shared what they believe are their most significant risks with the move to the cloud:

Conference attendees were primarily concerned about losing institutional customizations and cloud environments’ security, costs, and control.

Key Conference Takeaways and Recap

The Evisions team and customer presentations demonstrated the company’s progress to date and its go-forward plan for how its products could help smooth the road to the cloud for institutions on Ellucian or other solutions. Several of these cloud facilitators include clear, open support for other API-based data sources, including non-Ellucian solutions, direct support of Ellucian SaaS for Evisions IntelleCheck, FormFusion, and Argos products, and the movement of its core reporting and data management products to hybrid cloud products.

One of the most interesting observations at this conference was how customers are using the capabilities of Evisions Argos as a data Swiss Army knife, building small applications, supporting data conversion, and consolidating multi-platform reporting and dashboards.

With the enhancements to the platform supporting SaaS implementations, Evisions is aligning itself with its customers’ future—and setting itself up to be a key partner in these transitions.