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SunGard Higher Education Partners with Rhomobile to Accelerate Growth of Mobile in Higher Education
[July 11, 2011]

SunGard Higher Education Partners with Rhomobile to Accelerate Growth of Mobile in Higher Education


MALVERN, Pa, July 11, 2011 SunGard Higher Education has partnered with Rhomobile, the leader in next-generation enterprise mobility, to support and accelerate the growth of flexible enterprise-class mobile solutions across higher education.



In combination with the Rhomobile technology, SunGard’s Mobile Connection framework helps enable institutions to develop and deploy secure mobile applications across major mobile and smartphone devices more quickly and with fewer resources than before. SunGard Higher Education delivered its Mobile Connection, built on the Rhomobile Rhodes open source framework, this past December. As part of the offering, it provided a set of starter application components (m-Apps) to help institutions deploy and manage mobile strategies quickly, cost effectively and more consistently. Customer response to the open platform has been strong. As of June 2011, more than 400 institutions have licensed the Mobile Connection and more than 1,500 users have joined the SunGard Mobile Connection Commons group.

“College IT shops don’t have the time or expertise to rewrite a mobile application for multiple device platforms. The Rhomobile framework allows an app to be written once and deployed to multiple platforms with just a few minor changes,” said Jonathan Wheat, programmer/analyst at Messiah College, one of the first customers to license the Mobile Connection. “SunGard's Mobile Connection solution extends the framework, allowing access to data in SunGard systems from the mobile device as well as creating a modular structure that is easy to build on. I am hopeful that this new partnership will enable even more utilization of the Rhodes framework within Mobile Connection.” SunGard’s Mobile Connection is a highly configurable and extensible framework designed to help enable institutions to create native applications and deliver them to a variety of mobile devices, including Apple iPhones, iPads and iPod touch devices, Google Android-enabled smartphones and RIM Blackberry devices. As the partnership expands, SunGard expects to leverage additional Rhomobile capabilities to support the adoption of new mobile platforms, deliver integration to a broader set of enterprise data sources and possibly support a cloud infrastructure.


“The combination of the open source Rhodes framework and our Mobile Connection is a smart and quick path to bring mobile to higher education,” said Darren Wesemann, chief technology officer, SunGard Higher Education. “The innovative Rhodes framework supports our Open Digital Campus strategy that enables collaboration among customers and open source developers. The enthusiastic response we’ve already received from customers confirms that this is a smart approach that helps solve a pressing problem in higher education.” “SunGard’s industry-leading solutions and Rhomobile’s comprehensive open source mobile app framework will help institutions around the world build great apps for their students and their internal business, quickly and running on all devices. Even more exciting, SunGard ships their product with full source code available, so each institution can tailor and extend their offering. This helps create an entire new generation of smartphone developers, all with Rhodes as a default go-to smartphone framework,” said Adam Blum, CEO and founder of Rhomobile.

The open source nature of the SunGard Higher Education Mobile Connection makes it a collaborative community source-driven application. Although SunGard provides a series of m-Apps, the bulk of future apps will come through community source development and SunGard’s Mobile Connection Shared Code Repository. The community, which can include institutions, SunGard Higher Education partners and education associations, can develop and post applications to the Mobile Connection code repository. Then other institutions can easily download the mApps, helping enhance the functionality of their mobile applications. Those apps may pull data from SunGard Higher Education’s Banner or PowerCAMPUS administrative systems, or integrate with other administrative systems, learning management systems and data sources.

About Rhomobile Rhomobile Inc. offers the most modern and powerful enterprise mobility suite on the market today. At the foundation of their complete mobility solution is Rhodes, the world’s leading open source framework for enterprise mobility. Founded in 2008, the company’s award winning software has thousands of active developers and is ideal for independent software vendors, system integrators and enterprises of all sizes. Rhomobile offers a comprehensive, modern, highly adaptable, and low cost solution for today's smartphone app developer. Rhomobile, headquartered in San Jose, CA, is a privately held company with backing from vSpring Capital. For more information, please visit www.rhomobile.com.

About SunGard Higher Education SunGard Higher Education serves colleges, universities and foundations in 40 countries worldwide. Through its Open Digital Campus strategy, SunGard collaborates with the higher education community and provides software and services to help institutions find better ways to teach, learn, manage and connect. To learn more, please visit www.sungardhe.com.

About SunGard SunGard is one of the world's leading software and technology services companies. SunGard has more than 20,000 employees and serves more than 25,000 customers in more than 70 countries. SunGard provides software and processing solutions for financial services, higher education and the public sector. SunGard also provides disaster recovery services, managed IT services, information availability consulting services and business continuity management software. With annual revenue of about $5 billion, SunGard is ranked 434 on the Fortune 500 and is the largest privately held business software and IT services company. Look for us wherever the mission is critical. For more information, please visit www.sungard.com.

Trademark information: SunGard, the SunGard logo, Banner, PowerCAMPUS and Open Digital Campus are trademarks or registered trademarks of SunGard Data Systems Inc. or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. All other trade names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

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