Over the past decade college and university executives have witnessed the emergence of new innovations and new technologies powered by the Internet. At the same time colleges and universities have been investing in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems in an effort to achieve a greater degree of data and process integration.
The single–vendor, ERP strategy is now being challenged by the emergence of open source application software and by increasing demands for better integration with extended and disparate resources. Campus decisionmakers need to pause and ask, "What lies ahead?"
IBM believes that the open source movement is the start of the next major paradigm shift in the software industry. An open approach –– open source, open standards, open architectures and open communities –– forms a powerful combination that will unlock latent, innovative forces and provide the agility, flexibility and vendor independence colleges and universities are seeking.
This paper is intended to provide to provide a vision of some of the software innovations and business practices that will shape administrative applications within a reasonable planning horizon, now until 2010.
