Our experience with Universities and other Educational Instituations span more than 15 years. NETCB has a long standing involvement with Educational Institutions. This involvement includes providing messaging solutions such as Novell GroupWise to hundreds on thousands of Universtity Staff and Students. Today we have delivered a number of Identity Provisioning solutions that reduces the administration overheads at Universities significantly.
As Educational Institutations are facing budget constraints, there is always a need to find ways of reducing costs drastically, but at the same time imprive the level of services along with increasing the technological flexibility of the IT services within an Educational Instituation. The challenges that are faced by Educational Institutations are tremendous as technology is evolving much faster than what these institutions can keep up with.
This fact unfortunately has resulted in many Educational Instituations neglecting their responsibilities as an Educator in favour of "vendorism". This is where an Educational Institution decided to only use and expose technology from one or a select few vendors to limit the exposure of technology to the staff (Educators) and the students (Future Entrepeneurs). No one can ever deny the fact that as an Educator, it is your responsibility to expose your students to as much technology as what is possible. By only using certain vendors you are directly responsible for limiting innovation and intellectual development of your students, and in many cases that of the educators at an Educational Institutaion.
If an institutation is really serious about exposing their staff and students to business technology, they will select a neutral platform in the first place. This means selecting technology from the Open Source community or from Open Source Vendors, such as Novell, that will NOT limit you to a single vendor, but rather facilitate and ease the implementation of technologies from other vendors as you will require over time.
It is rather unfortunate that many such idiotic decisions are being made by selecting single vendor approaches that will cost any organisation much more over the long term. In doing so, you limit your own freedom of choice and ability to be agile as you are completely reliant on a single vendor for your business. It continues to be an astonishing fact how many highly educated people still fall for the marketing hype that is so often punted, but streching the true facts about their solutions in such a way that the customer belive it will work.
We are therefore exceptional involved in education, not just from a technology solutions perspective, but also to assist Educational Institutions on policy and strategy decisions.
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