[sims] How late is SIMS 8?

[sonofsanta]

So is Q1 2021 the latest anybody has heard from Capita about their Secondary Sims 8?

 

 

I heard that from a sales bod on their pitch about two weeks ago

[Primus]

I'm sure I've subsequently seen Q2 2021 now. Cannot remember where though.

[Ditto]

I'm sure it's going to be manyana

[park_bench]

We've started the process.

Already seen Bromcom.

iSams next week.

 

For those that have moved away from SIMS.net - when did you do this? Did you all wait until your contract expired, which I presume would be March?

 

Or did you ascertain the 'best' time for your school to migrate and just accept that you'd be paying for SIMS and not using it for a period of time?

 

You certainly need to manage the migration well and fit it into a time-frame that works well for your school/MAT. For us though, we didn't want to enter into another lenghty agreement with Capita so had about 3 months to switch. A bit more forward planning is advised!

 

Our secondary school acadamised with 3 local primary schools in July 2018 which gave us the opportunity to evaluate all our systems and SLAs. The cost of SIMS to us as an academy was going to be seriously eye-watering so it prompted us to look at what else was out there in the MIS market, carefully evaluating Bromcom, Arbor and Scholarpack. We went for Bromcom because it is fully featured for both Secondary and Primary (we wanted the same system in all the trust's academies, which ruled-out Scholarpack) and seemed much more developed for Secondary use than Arbor (Arbor looked great, but during the deep-dive demonstration we couldn't get the information we needed easily).

 

In hindsight, It is crazy that we didn't look at moving to a modern cloud-based MIS years ago - we just put-up with SIMS because "it works and staff know how to use it". 18 months on with Bromcom, and we are really reaping the rewards now in terms of efficiency and time-saving for staff, cost-savings for the finance bods and innovating with new processes and procedures that just wouldn't have been possible with SIMS. Yes, there is a period of strife and hard-work as you migrate staff onto a new system with new workflows, but we managed this upheavel in all our schools within a term. Small pain for big gains.

 

Good luck with it!

[mavhc]

Our secondary school acadamised with 3 local primary schools in July 2018 which gave us the opportunity to evaluate all our systems and SLAs. The cost of SIMS to us as an academy was going to be seriously eye-watering so it prompted us to look at what else was out there in the MIS market, carefully evaluating Bromcom, Arbor and Scholarpack. We went for Bromcom because it is fully featured for both Secondary and Primary (we wanted the same system in all the trust's academies, which ruled-out Scholarpack) and seemed much more developed for Secondary use than Arbor (Arbor looked great, but during the deep-dive demonstration we couldn't get the information we needed easily).

 

How much was sims vs bromcom?

[panosthegreat]

How much was sims vs bromcom?

Their prices are all online on a government site for transparency, https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/g-cloud/services/172233866143787 (Pricing.pdf on the right of the page)

 

There's a few grand setup fee, then its either £7/user or £10/user for the all singing & dancing version.

 

For our school it's going to work out about the same cost as SIMS as we have lots of the extra SIMS modules, which should hopefully drop a bit more after a year when we start removing our 3rd party systems and replacing them with the Bromcom in-built systems.

[park_bench]

How much was sims vs bromcom?

 

We are a small MAT (1 secondary and 3 primaries), even so, the SIMS license alone was going to cost a few £1000 more than the Bromcom system, but bear in mind that Bromcom is cloud-based (we hosted SIMS in school) and has many modules included in the price that previously we had to pay for over and above the basic license. So the total cost of ownership of Bromcom is incredibly low compared to SIMS. Off the top of my head, these are some of the add-ons that we no longer have to pay for because it's all included:

 

X SchoolComms for home/school communication

X ShowMyHomework for Student assignments and resources

X Teacher App for mobile devices

X Parent's Evening Booking system

X Room and resource booking system

X Discover for data visualisations

X Class charts for seating plans

X Cpoms for safeguard

X Data manager's time in creating decent analysis using Excel

X New SIMS server every few years

X SQL Licenses for SIMS server

X Remote Desktop licenses

X Remote back-up solution SIMS server

X Network Manager's time managing the SIMS server and client installs

X NM's time managing all the 3rd party data connections to MIS

X Time spent explaining to parents why they have so many different log-ins to different systems!

 

I realise that SIMS also now do a hosted solution so our savings on the hardware and support side may not apply to everyone, but as I understand it, Capita hosting charge is higher because their product being Windows-based rather than a proper browser/cloud solution. Just with the included modules alone and the reduction in stress of synching-up multiple systems, it's worth it! When our SBM was scrutinising the Bromcom quotes they produced some TCO comparisons for a small MAT - savings against LA hosted SIMS was projected to be about £35K over 5 years and non-LA SIMS (licensed directly with Capita) savings were going to be well over £100K. Feel free to PM me if you want more info.

[DODICT]

Their prices are all online on a government site for transparency, https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/g-cloud/services/172233866143787 (Pricing.pdf on the right of the page)

 

There's a few grand setup fee, then its either £7/user or £10/user for the all singing & dancing version.

 

For our school it's going to work out about the same cost as SIMS as we have lots of the extra SIMS modules, which should hopefully drop a bit more after a year when we start removing our 3rd party systems and replacing them with the Bromcom in-built systems.

For a single school I really wouldnt procure through the framework. A lot of hassle and limits your ability to negotiate. Price was not really a priority for us in changing our MIS - we had needs that couldn't be fulfilled by our legacy systems so we wanted to see if there were better solutions out there (IMHO there are !) but that said a bit of haggling here and there you should see some intimidate cost savings switching from SIMS even before you start totting up hidden costs like servers, power, backup etc. Even more so if you have numerous add ons - parental comms, room booking, parents evening solutions - they can quickly be binned off.

[supportman]

Their prices are all online on a government site for transparency, https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/g-cloud/services/172233866143787 (Pricing.pdf on the right of the page)

 

There's a few grand setup fee, then its either £7/user or £10/user for the all singing & dancing version.

 

For our school it's going to work out about the same cost as SIMS as we have lots of the extra SIMS modules, which should hopefully drop a bit more after a year when we start removing our 3rd party systems and replacing them with the Bromcom in-built systems.

 

From that document, Bromcom looks to charge about double what Capita Sims costs for our 1,000 student school :/

 

Very disappointing...

[Primus]

Bromcom are cheaper than SIMS...

[sonofsanta]

So far Bromcom have not been particularly hard to push down on price, though--they know they're effectively the scrappy young startup here, and need to grow fast and win schools to get word of mouth out. Of the options we have prices for at the moment (current FacilityCMIS, SIMS and Bromcom), Bromcom are the cheapest. If anyone else comes in cheaper on the quotes I'm waiting on, they've hinted very strongly that they'll price match.

[supportman]

So far Bromcom have not been particularly hard to push down on price, though--they know they're effectively the scrappy young startup here, and need to grow fast and win schools to get word of mouth out. Of the options we have prices for at the moment (current FacilityCMIS, SIMS and Bromcom), Bromcom are the cheapest. If anyone else comes in cheaper on the quotes I'm waiting on, they've hinted very strongly that they'll price match.

 

Good to know, but the £10 per student + 1k setup fee is £10,000 per year ongoing, thats way more than we spend on Sims, almost double.

Edited January 9, 2020 by supportman

[PotNoodleTech]

Good to know, but the £10 per student + 1k setup fee is £10,000 per year ongoing, thats way more than we spend on Sims, almost double.

 

SIMS support isn't cheap - is that going via your LEA or direct to capita?

[sonofsanta]

I dunno how you're getting that SIMS pricing then, as their quote is about 25% more than Bromcom straight out of the gate, even before any discussions on price. (Not that I disbelieve you! Just frustrated at the obfuscation and varying levels of pricing across schools...)

[edtechyamyam]

Bromcom do have an Local Authority pricing structure on G Cloud 11 as well, it includes finance as well if comparisons need to be made.

 

https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/g-cloud/services/914792688495638

[Ditto]

Bromcom do have an Local Authority pricing structure on G Cloud 11 as well, it includes finance as well if comparisons need to be made.

 

https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/g-cloud/services/914792688495638

 

Having got quotes from 5 different MIS providers in the past, I didn't find the .gov. site too helpful. Unfortunately there isn't a clear and open pricing structure across the market place, so you need to negotiate directly. I found the discount available on a renewal even more effective - an MIS provider having fought hard to win a school over doesn't want to lose them.

[smarties11]

There's a couple of mentions here of people running SIMS and CMIS on Server 2008R2 etc and the work involved in migrating to a new server for what might be a short period of time.

 

If your existing server is virtual then consider an in-place upgrade to Server 2012 - that's what I did here with our SIMS server last summer. It worked absolutely fine and Server 2012 is supported until October 2023. The only minor issue I had was that I had to re-install .NET framework.

 

Not ideal by any stretch but migrating to a new server including all the MIS links to various external sources would have been a right PITA. If it had failed I'd have just rolled back the snapshot and planned a full migration, so there was nothing to lose in trying. Hopefully SIMS will have released SIMS8 by October 2023!

Edited January 9, 2020 by smarties11

[supportman]

SIMS support isn't cheap - is that going via your LEA or direct to capita?

 

Direct

[mavhc]

It's great how they expect you to pay for their product, and then to pay for them to help you fix their crappy product.

 

We seem to be forced to use FMS due to being an LA school, sigh.

 

So server 2019 is £250, and then £21.50 per computer for the imaginary CAL software, bleh

[supportman]

I saw this useful graphic during the BETT show.

 

Interesting to see who is moving where....

 

[MartinT]

Presumably that excludes independent schools. The sample size seems remarkably small.

[localzuk]

That is a very narrow graphic - specifically state secondary school cloud MIS users it seems. There are 4188 such schools in the UK, so that list is around 9.4% of them. Not that small.

[mavhc]

Did they forget to bring the pie chart showing cloud vs not cloud installations?

[GREED]

Indeed - this is secondary only (which of course the cynic in me says there is more money per site). Interestingly, doesn't show where they moved from - one would assume a fair amount it FROM SIMS to x, but it could all be attrition from one cloud provider to another...

[supportman]

I saw bromcom and BETT and the new interface made it look very modern, I came away impressed.

 

iSams looked quite old in comparison.