[sims] Capita is trying to sell off non-core businesses (SIMS is for sale)

[CAM]

Latest news. Capita in talks with private equity firm Montagu.

 

https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-capita-divestment/uks-capita-in-exclusive-talks-with-pe-firm-montagu-for-ess-sale-idUKKBN2870SA

 

Their portfolio is here. https://www.montagu.com/portfolio/

 

Includes names like Maplin. Hmmmm.

 

 

 

Also what name will they give it the company? Can't keep Capita in the name and probably not a good idea to call it Montagu ESS....

Edited November 27, 2020 by CAM

[TechMonkey]

What an odd bunch of companies in that portfolio. I know equity firms like diversity to mitigate downturns but that is very eclectic!

[supportman]

What an odd bunch of companies in that portfolio. I know equity firms like diversity to mitigate downturns but that is very eclectic!

 

The world of private equity is a bizarre and mysterious mix of spending money and cutting costs. Its sometimes more about leveraging their future earnings to borrow more money so I wouldn't read anything into their company mix other than they probably have a reliable revenue stream.

 

I still don't get why anyone would want this legacy business, the only way really is down due to their near monopoly share in the past.

[DODICT]

Can tap into BIFFA (Experts in waste disposal) to get rid of the rubbish that is SIMS ?

[TechMonkey]

I still don't get why anyone would want this legacy business, the only way really is down due to their near monopoly share in the past.

 

They must see some value that they can split and sell off. Even if it is customer base. That would be why they haven't got the price they want previously, everyone else knows that there is no value in teh products, just what they can spin off or sell later.

[supportman]

They must see some value that they can split and sell off. Even if it is customer base. That would be why they haven't got the price they want previously, everyone else knows that there is no value in teh products, just what they can spin off or sell later.

The acquisition strategy can be as simple as them buying then raising prices. Often they also strip back support and reduce headcount. Lots of options, none are generally good for the end customer....

Edited November 27, 2020 by supportman

[Ditto]

Which if true, I would suggest to SIMS schools, run now before they up the prices, and if they do, will allow the newcomers to up theirs too - get a 5 year deal at least.

[FN-GM]

Which if true, I would suggest to SIMS schools, run now before they up the prices, and if they do, will allow the newcomers to up theirs too - get a 5 year deal at least.

 

It would be foolish to lock in for 5 years.

 

1. The product itself is old and legacy. There is nothing firm to say this will change.

 

2. If the service does suffer you will be stuck with the predict for a considerable amount of time.

 

Surely when you see something bad on the horizon you would look at other options instead of pressing ahead?

[elsiegee40]

From The Times today: bidders pulling out

[Ditto]

It would be foolish to lock in for 5 years.

 

1. The product itself is old and legacy. There is nothing firm to say this will change.

 

2. If the service does suffer you will be stuck with the predict for a considerable amount of time.

 

Surely when you see something bad on the horizon you would look at other options instead of pressing ahead?

When I say "run now", I mean to something other than Sims! The logic being: if Sims gets bought and prices rise (they already came out expensive when I reviewed 4 MIS), other MIS may take the opportunity to put prices up. On reflection, there's probably enough competition anyway. Short versus long contracts is perhaps worthy of a separate thread, but I got significant per pupil head discount from Advanced for 3 and 5 year contracts.

 

*** EDIT I decided it was a separate thread - here you go http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/218940-short-versus-long-term-contracts-pros-cons.html ***

Edited November 28, 2020 by Ditto

[Ditto]

[ATTACH]59962[/ATTACH]

From The Times today: bidders pulling out

Fantastic article. It suggests the potential buyers are doing their due diligence. There are a couple of fantastic lines in there "more technology-savvy competitors". That sums up a lot of the feelings expressed here. "Capita confirm it has entered into exclusive talks with Montagu...". That is spin of the highest order! Put in other words - "last man standing" or "last rat on the sinking ship" seem more appropriate. If Capita get an offer of £350 million, they should grab it with both hands. I have nothing personally against Capita or Sims, but in the technology world, continual re-investment is part of the industry and if you drop that baton, it'll cost you eventually.

[localzuk]

Fantastic article. It suggests the potential buyers are doing their due diligence. There are a couple of fantastic lines in there "more technology-savvy competitors". That sums up a lot of the feelings expressed here. "Capita confirm it has entered into exclusive talks with Montagu...". That is spin of the highest order! Put in other words - "last man standing" or "last rat on the sinking ship" seem more appropriate. If Capita get an offer of £350 million, they should grab it with both hands. I have nothing personally against Capita or Sims, but in the technology world, continual re-investment is part of the industry and if you drop that baton, it'll cost you eventually.

Realistically, the company would be buying a legacy MIS, an MIS in its infancy and a list of customers that has been continually shrinking for years.

 

If it were a growing list this would be different matter. If Sims was regarded highly by everyone that used it, it'd be a different matter. If Capita had not made some huge mistakes over the last few years damaging the brand, it would be a different matter.

 

But all put together, it is a hard sell. Compare spending £350m on ESS, or building your own products for the same amount or less.

[supportman]

But all put together, it is a hard sell. Compare spending £350m on ESS, or building your own products for the same amount or less.

A good software developer will cost a company 80kish a year in central London. Put 20 of them in a box(or more likely remotely these days) for 6 months and you have brand new native cloud web based, responsive MIS based on some new lovely upgradable framework and scalable Database. I can't see it costing more than 5 million if done with modern project management practices. Start advertising on Edugeek, get some early adopters on board and make the software development process open with requests and feedback. Give schools a free 6 months and make the migration path easy and trouble free.

 

Honestly, I loved Sims back in the day, but their lack of understanding about agile software development and dealing with technical debt is astounding. I think this comes from the over arching company, rather than the people who have run the educational division over the years and its just another sad story of cost cutting and bad decisions from the top.

[vikpaw]

A good software developer will cost a company 80kish a year in central London. Put 20 of them in a box(or more likely remotely these days) for 6 months and you have brand new native cloud web based, responsive MIS based on some new lovely upgradable framework and scalable Database. I can't see it costing more than 5 million if done with modern project management practices. Start advertising on Edugeek, get some early adopters on board and make the software development process open with requests and feedback. Give schools a free 6 months and make the migration path easy and trouble free.

 

Honestly, I loved Sims back in the day, but their lack of understanding about agile software development and dealing with technical debt is astounding. I think this comes from the over arching company, rather than the people who have run the educational division over the years and its just another sad story of cost cutting and bad decisions from the top.

A newcomer could do that and become a challenger.

 

The issue is the baggage that comes with being Capita, from customers, to legacy modules with patches to modernise them.

[supportman]

A newcomer could do that and become a challenger.

 

The issue is the baggage that comes with being Capita, from customers, to legacy modules with patches to modernise them.

 

If I was Capita I would have started again from scratch.

 

Starting a fresh and simply exporting/importing the data is very simple, but trying to upgrade or base it on existing data structures is not.

[Linfit]

If I was Capita I would have started again from scratch.

 

Which they tried to do, but they suffer from terrible coorporate inertia, a poor organisational culture which stifles innovation and prevents rapid development techniques being used, the inability to appreciate (or have any interest in) what the customers actually need, a tendency to re-invent the wheel, off-shoring software development to people who have no cultural understanding of the market, so it proved impossible.

 

They are in a complete no-win situation at the moment. the only possible way forward is to put all their revenue into a ground up new start with new management structures and rapid development, but Capita are incapable of that and any buyer will only be interested in milking the revenue for a few years and selling other crap to the customer base.

[RootsSchImp]

A good software developer will cost a company 80kish a year in central London. Put 20 of them in a box(or more likely remotely these days) for 6 months and you have brand new native cloud web based, responsive MIS based on some new lovely upgradable framework and scalable Database. I can't see it costing more than 5 million if done with modern project management practices. Start advertising on Edugeek, get some early adopters on board and make the software development process open with requests and feedback. Give schools a free 6 months and make the migration path easy and trouble free.

 

Having seen this equation from the MIS side I think there's a tendency on the school side to underestimate how difficult it is to build an MIS, because tend customers conceive of the MIS as: System that does exactly what I want it to. It's true that if you're building to one person or even one school's specification of that it would be reasonably straightforward (though I still think it would take more than 2 devs for six months). However, the challenge is building something that works for all types of users across the whole sector. One that satisfies the demand for flexible functionality from techy users like us, while keeping things simple enough for the person in reception who knows the square root of FA about computers. I wasn't a software dev at Bromcom, but I made BI templates and the difficulty jump between a dashboard that will work with one school's assessment structures to something that will work with *any* school's assessment structures is massive.

 

Plus of course when you have a big user base like SIMS, the pressure to keep things people like is greater, so while there's no doubt Capita have done a poor job of developing SIMS 8, I think they failed at something hard not something easy.

[paulkerton]

Plus of course when you have a big user base like SIMS, the pressure to keep things people like is greater, so while there's no doubt Capita have done a poor job of developing SIMS 8, I think they failed at something hard not something easy.

The hard part seems to me that generally, the customer base wants it to change, but at the same time wants it to stay the same. Capita seems to have got stuck in between a rock and a hard place when it comes to 7 to 8 migration, and what people expect from the UI. Last I heard, they got a split down the middle when it came to "it's changed too much" vs "it needed to change". They also have an expectation that SIMS 8 should do everything SIMS 7 currently does on release, and I think the Frankenstein nature of 7 has got them really stuck when it comes to what 8 is supposed to do, especially as 7 does load a lot of the query processing onto the client, whereas that really wouldn't be feasible in a web based product.

 

Development is hard, but not as hard as Capita have made the development of SIMS 8. It shouldn't take a long as it has. It's been 4.5 years since they were testing SIMS 8 in Ireland.

[enjay]

They also have an expectation that SIMS 8 should do everything SIMS 7 currently does on release

 

Which is ironic, since SIMS 7 still relies on Nova for timetabling!

[enjay]

Realistically, the company would be buying a legacy MIS, an MIS in its infancy and a list of customers that has been continually shrinking for years.

 

If it were a growing list this would be different matter. If Sims was regarded highly by everyone that used it, it'd be a different matter. If Capita had not made some huge mistakes over the last few years damaging the brand, it would be a different matter.

 

But all put together, it is a hard sell. Compare spending £350m on ESS, or building your own products for the same amount or less.

 

Compatibility and data migration is probably both the main selling point and main sticking point. I think whatever phoenix rises from the ashes of Capita SIMS needs to have a simple import path. Maybe what the buyer will get for their £350m is a good look at the database structures and some necessary patents so they can then incorporate that into a ground-up write of an HTML5 platform.

[paulkerton]

Maybe what the buyer will get for their £350m is a good look at the database structures and some necessary patents so they can then incorporate that into a ground-up write of an HTML5 platform.

Montagu's portfolio is a bit eclectic to say the least, but I can see them using SIMS as a trojan horse for that customer database to feed towards:

 

• OASIS Group for record and information management (Get those GDPR Euros rolling in!)
  
• Wireless Logic & Legrand for data networking, mobile connectivity etc.
  
• Galileo Education could find ways to expand into the 11-18 space
  
• Biffa for waste management services
  
• Host Europe for domain and server hosting
  
• Linpac for catering products
  
• Establish a B2B service under the Maplin brand
  
• Volution for heating and air conditioning solutions
  

So theres potential for them to take on Education Software Services, rename it to SIMS as the customer facing brand name, supporting the SIMS 8 development, and leveraging the customer portfolio for their wider businesses to provide more services to the EDU space. There aren't many companies who have custom in as large as percentage of British schools than Capita ESS. Perhaps Wonde are the only company close to being as widely used these days.

[enjay]

So theres potential for them to take on Education Software Services, rename it to SIMS as the customer facing brand name, supporting the SIMS 8 development, and leveraging the customer portfolio for their wider businesses to provide more services to the EDU space.

 

That's the other option, of course.

 

There aren't many companies who have custom in as large as percentage of British schools than Capita ESS. Perhaps Wonde are the only company close to being as widely used these days.

 

CRB Cunninghams? Impero and ParentMail probably have a good foothold too.

 

Plus, ParentMail et al are steadily reaching out further with messaging, payments, trips planning, absence notification, attendance data, progress reports and more - buy an MIS and then buy ParentMail, and you're well on your way to achieving Capita's dominance (and then - cynic mode activated - you don't need to do much further development!).

[enjay]

CRB Cunninghams? Impero and ParentMail probably have a good foothold too.

 

And RM Education of course

[paulkerton]

Plus, ParentMail et al are steadily reaching out further with messaging, payments, trips planning, absence notification, attendance data, progress reports and more - buy an MIS and then buy ParentMail, and you're well on your way to achieving Capita's dominance (and then - cynic mode activated - you don't need to do much further development!).

 

As you can see on the Edugeek homepage, Iris Education (who own ParentMail) have just purchased iSAMS and are talking about an MIS revolution themselves so...

 

I think whoever buys SIMS is relying on intransigence and need to think about moving quickly on their own development, considering Bromcom, Arbor and iSAMS are out there... let alone the primary focused MIS's that exist...

Edited December 1, 2020 by paulkerton

[the_quick]

If support for iSams from iris is going to be the same they provide for fasttrack canteen system, I wouldn't touch them.