[DG: Open Forum] rSmart & SunGard HE Partner on Sakai

[Nate Angell]

Today we announced that rSmart and SunGard Higher Education have
formed a strategic partnership to support broad adoption of Sakai
across higher education.

Under the terms of the partnership, SunGard Higher Education will
encourage customers to adopt the rSmart Sakai CLE and will offer
services to assist its customers in implementing and expanding the
rSmart Sakai CLE. rSmart will provide support and hosting services to
both rSmart’s and SunGard Higher Education’s customers.

Our relationship with our existing customers and our commitment to the
Sakai community will remain unchanged. rSmart's core expertise and
passion center on working effectively with community-source software
projects in higher education.  We will continue to focus on providing
high-quality, cost-effective services, support, and hosting. We expect
our contributions to the Sakai community to continue and to grow. The
rSmart development team has been very focused on contributing defect
fixes to the community maintenance efforts and developing new
functionality for the Sakai 2.8 community release. This work will
continue, as will our contributions to product leadership, the
teaching and learning group, and other community efforts.

SunGard Higher Education customers within the Sakai community will
gain the benefit of supported, real-time data integration between
Sakai and SunGard Higher Education’s ERP systems as an extension of
already existing community work with the IMS LIS standard, as well as
strategic alignment between the companies’ future products.

We do expect the partnership to spur significant new adoption of
Sakai. SunGard Higher Education brings unique resources and expertise
to Sakai, given the size and diversity of its customer community and
the strength of its sales force. We hope to see the partnership bring
new perspectives, investments, and friends into our community.

Should you have any questions about the partnership, please feel free
to contact me directly, or to continue conversation on the Sakai
community open forum list (cc'd here). We have also added information
about the partnership to our website at http://www.rsmart.com/sakai,
where you can also find details to join one of two virtual meetings
where we will share additional details and answer questions about the
partnerhsip.

Sincerely,
Nate Angell
Client Evangelist
rSmart