Oracle announced late on Monday, April 30, 2018, that they had completed the acquisition of Vocado, a cloud based financial aid solution for Higher Education institutions. This represents a major acquisition for Oracle within the Student Information Systems space, with immediate potential impact for HEUG members. From their release:
Vocado works with thousands of financial aid sources to optimize funding for any type of higher education learning model. The solution helps students identify eligibility and obtain financing to achieve their academic goals. Vocado integrates its financial aid solution with both cloud and on-premise Student Information Systems (SIS)
HEUG Vice President of Products, Buddy Combs, said “We look forward to seeing this acquisition become a part of the Oracle family. Our Financial Aid advisory group and members had identified Financial Aid as a strategic gap in the Oracle Student Cloud offering and are excited to see Oracle move quickly to fill this gap.”
The HEUG Board was able to get an update from Oracle this morning to address initial questions and concerns, primarily focused on getting resources put together for our members and connections for our Financial Aid Advisory Group.
Jane Broad, President of the Higher Education User, added, “This is very encouraging acquisition as a product, but even more so it is a very significant acquisition of talented people who know Financial Aid for Oracle. We look forward to seeing how this can integrate with the Student Cloud suite of solutions and the PeopleSoft products many of our members use today. We were also encouraged to hear about flexibility in the product that may make it viable for our members outside the US.”
We encourage you to join into our Financial Aid discussion list where a new thread has been started to discuss thoughts from our members:
In addition, we have gathered links and resources for members below: