HighPoint Technology Solutions Acquires Smart Planner

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Aug 25, 2020, 14:00 ET

CORAL GABLES, Fla., Aug. 25, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- HighPoint Technology Solutions announces today the acquisition of Smart Planner from The Burgundy Group, Inc. Smart Planner is the market leader in automated course sequencing for degree planning at PeopleSoft higher education institutions.

Smart Planner was launched in mid-2012 to help students graduate on time. The Burgundy Group team grew Smart Planner across a diverse group of innovative institutions that includes multiple CSUs, the University of Central Florida and New York University, to name a few.

All told, over 500,000 students use Smart Planner to plan an efficient path to graduation.

Today's acquisition by HighPoint further cements its intention and focus to further improve student success and on-time completion for students at PeopleSoft institutions.

"We are happy to continue Smart Planner's legacy that started almost a decade ago. Demand for our suite of student success tools in class scheduling, advising, student experience, messaging, and our own degree planning solutions for PeopleSoft is increasing. Institutions are growing more frustrated with third-party approaches that are typically built to accommodate multiple Student Information Systems (SIS's). This creates a watered-down approach that doesn't provide the rich features and capabilities students and institutions demand.

Additionally, given a tough environment for institutions to purchase new and unproven SIS's due to the high costs and risks, and the current state of Higher Ed during a pandemic, it will potentially be a long time before schools start looking for SIS replacements. Our goal is to extend the life of PeopleSoft through a modern suite of tools that can keep their investment relevant for years to come. We look forward to working with these innovative schools and with Jeff Davis and his team on the transition process." George Amalor, Founder and CEO of HighPoint.

Developing a pathway to on-time graduation in an automated fashion is still one of the thorniest challenges to solve in Higher Education. Improvements in this area save students, parents as well as taxpayers billions of dollars annually. Based on Department of Education's reports, only 37% of all students graduated from the same institution eight years later – down from 45% last year. The graduation rate for Two-Year institutions was 27% and 48% at Four-Year institutions.

"We are thrilled that Smart Planner is now in the hands of HighPoint. Their commitment to student success with PeopleSoft institutions over the past 14 years makes this a great fit. We are now focused on expanding our investments and energy into our thriving Managed Services business currently being used at institutions like University of Arizona, Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges, and University of Texas System." Jeff Davis, Partner at The Burgundy Group.

About HighPoint: HighPoint has partnered with close to 160 PeopleSoft institutions and with over 350 products licensed they are the leaders in student success solutions for PeopleSoft institutions. The company believes in helping institutions get more out of their Oracle investments through better outcomes, faster deployments and compelling user experiences. HighPoint products include a broad array of solutions for Advising, Class Scheduling, Degree Planning, Messaging, Student Experience and Messaging needs.

About Burgundy: The Burgundy Group provides PeopleSoft environment management services to higher education clients. Burgundy provides its services either on premise or in the AWS cloud. Burgundy services include proprietary migration tools and environment generating automations for the AWS cloud. Burgundy's PeopleSoft environment automations for the AWS cloud can build out, from nothing but an artifact, a complete PeopleSoft environment in about 40 minutes. The automations materially improve environment performance and substantially reduce clients' AWS costs.

SOURCE HighPoint Technology Solutions