IMS Global: Care to make any predictions on the future use of technology in higher education?

CB: I think the challenges are keeping pace with today's students. The traditional students come into these universities and colleges with a very different set of expertise, knowledge, and expectations about what it means to have customer service-where they should be able to find things and how easily they should be able to find them. Technology plays a huge role there and certainly keeping pace with that alone is the challenge.

Without getting too far into the future or talking about podcasts and the like, I'll go back to what is going to practically change in the business over the next five years. Some of that I've already spoken to, solving this integration piece. For example, I was talking to a major public research university last week and they were doing an inventory of the applications, from enterprise class to departmental level, on their systems. Their inventory came to more than 700 applications. We've got to look at a future that says part of that should be the delivered business process, part of that should be solved by integration.

For example, in the traditional school, we do enrollment one way, which is very different from how we do it for alumni free offerings and our continuing education or extension courses. Business models in education have been changing, can change, need to change, and will continue to change. The future is about achieving flexibility in the way you deploy your applications against those changes.