According to a news release this week, Tyler is partnering with Infinite Campus to migrate Tyler’s SIS clients onto Infinite Campus’ platform, while Tyler will offer its back-end systems for enterprise resource planning (ERP) and student transportation systems to Infinite Campus customers. According to the announcement, Tyler will migrate those clients at no cost, depending on the size of the district.
“Given the compliance-heavy market and resources required to support our SIS products in the market today, we have carefully chosen to partner with Infinite Campus to best serve our SIS clients in this ever-changing space,” Sean Marlow, senior vice president and general manager of Tyler’s Schools solutions, said in a public statement. “We are committed to providing a seamless transition to our clients, including a smooth data conversion to Infinite Campus’ solution. At the same time, this partnership allows us to strengthen our focus on our industry-leading K-12 products in ERP and student transportation.”
Infinite Campus founder and CEO Charlie Kratsch told Government Technology that given the different but interrelated tasks handled by front-end SIS and back-end ERP systems, he expects data accuracy and efficiency to benefit from the partnership, with Tyler clients starting to make the change by 2023.
“When you hire a new teacher, you do that in your HR system, but then we need to know about that teacher so we can get them scheduled in classes and allow them to teach, take attendance and everything else. If you don’t have tight integration between those two products, it is a very manual process that can take weeks,” he said. “What we will have with this integration between our two systems is, the instant you employ that teacher, they’re ready to teach. That’s a huge time saver for school districts.”
Kratsch said he expects most of Tyler’s SIS client base in U.S. K-12 districts, serving about 800,000 students, to overlap with Infinite Campus’ customer base, which includes 8 million students in 2,000 districts across 45 states.
He added that the companies’ sales teams will work together to cross-sell products in the months ahead.
“Quite a few of our customers that are using Infinite Campus are shopping for new ERP solutions, and we’re already starting to talk to them to recommend the Tyler product for them, so we see a net win for both companies,” Kratsch said. “Both Tyler and Infinite Campus will benefit from cross selling. For districts that are using the Tyler ERP solution, we’ve now got a nice avenue to sell our student administration solution to those schools and vice versa.”
Kratsch said the idea for the partnership came after Infinite Campus discontinued the development of its own ERP system two years ago.
“Over the last couple years, Tyler made the decision to partner with us and focus on ERP, and then we’d focus on student admin and work together,” he said. “That’s a huge advantage, having vendors work together like this, each focusing on their own strengths, yet providing that tight integration between the two product suites.”
Marlow told Government Technology the partnership will have “symbiotic benefits” for K-12 districts, given the overlapping data handled by both companies’ platforms.
“Tyler’s ERP solution has all the HR data on a school district’s staff, including teacher information around what certifications they hold that make them uniquely qualified to teach certain classes or grade levels, and a student information system also has teacher data, so it benefits from being paired up with a district’s HR solution as part of their ERP portfolio,” he said. “Having all of that data pulled dynamically from an HR solution and a district’s ERP platform makes that process administratively easier.”
Editor's note: This story was updated to specify which client base of Tyler Technologies will be migrated to Infinite Campus, and which client base serves 800,000 students.
