These new projects indicate that more and more universities recognize an opportunity to cut the costs of administrative computing while benefiting from best-of-breed enterprise systems built for education by education. By relying on rSmart, universities can begin using Kuali sooner than would otherwise be possible with the highest level of confidence.

“It’s exciting to see so many new institutions working with community-developed, open source software solutions like Kuali,” said Chris Coppola, President of The rSmart Group. “Research shows that [the perceived] lack of support for open source software is the greatest barrier to adoption. I’m proud to be part of a talented team at rSmart that works with colleges and universities every day to remove that barrier and support the innovation of these education communities. Red Hat and others removed that barrier for Linux; rSmart and partners like IBM are removing it for Kuali.”

About Kuali:

The Kuali Foundation is a non-profit organization responsible for sustaining and evolving a comprehensive suite of open source administrative software that meets the needs of all Carnegie Class institutions of higher education. Its members are colleges, universities, commercial firms and interested organizations that share a common vision of open, modular, and distributed systems for administrative computing. The Kuali Foundation manages a growing portfolio of enterprise software applications for colleges and universities, such as Kuali Financial System (KFS), Kuali Research Administration (KRA), Kuali Endowment Management (KEM), Kuali Rice, which includes enterprise workflow and other Kuali infrastructure, and Kuali Student System (KSS). Foundation staff coordinate the activities of Foundation members for critical software development activities such as source code control, release engineering, packaging, documentation, project management, software testing and quality assurance, conference planning, and educating and assisting members of the Kuali Commercial Affiliate program.

Please visit www.kuali.org for more information.

About The rSmart Group:

The rSmart Group is the leading open source application software company serving the education market. rSmart packages, certifies, deploys, and supports a suite of enterprise financial and collaboration and learning applications for colleges, universities, and schools serving grades K–12. As a commercial affiliate of open source projects like Kuali and Sakai, rSmart is able to provide its clients with software applications specifically designed to meet the unique needs of educational institutions. This collaborative approach allows rSmart to offer open source applications that break the dependence of educational institutions on traditional proprietary software vendors.