Dell and SunGard Higher Education have announced that they will expand their existing strategic relationship to make their solutions more interoperable and help higher education institutions worldwide improve efficiencies, streamline operations and enhance learning.

The expanded relationship supports SunGard’s new Open Digital Campus strategy and gives campuses and universities wider access to open, scalable products to build out their solutions, based on Dell PowerEdge servers and Intel Xeon Processors. The companies also announced plans to open a new digital campus test center at Dell’s Central Texas headquarters for customers to preview technology solutions designed to optimize IT environments.

According to Dell, the new onsite test center will help the company’s engineers to:

• Conduct a broader range of testing on full-scale campus reference-architecture and evaluate software and hardware solutions before purchase decisions are made.
• Quickly use a portfolio of tools to help IT departments measure operational efficiency, manageability and flexibility.
• Develop co-branded sizing guides to help reduce cost and complexity of maintaining technology.
• Develop reference architectures based on unique customer environments that take into consideration interoperability challenges facing higher education today.
• Work with SunGard Higher Education to test Dell products, including Dell EqualLogic iSCSI storage, with SunGard products.

Higher Education CIOs increasingly face demands to expand core IT services for the campus environment, often while dealing with current budget constraints. The expanded relationship and new digital campus test center are aimed at helping higher education IT leaders worldwide meet these demands while reducing the burden associated with integrating disparate campus technologies. Recently, Dell and SunGard Higher Education hosted a roundtable as part of activities during the GITEX 2009 conference in Dubai. The roundtable addressed crucial topics in technology for education, including learning management systems, e-learning initiatives in the Middle East, and high performance clustering.

With the expanded global relationship, Dell and SunGard Higher Education can effectively provide IT departments with the solutions and services they need to help achieve greater flexibility in the way they manage the use of IT across campuses.

“Our new Open Digital Campus vision and technology strategy aims to give colleges, universities and foundations more flexibility to shape how technology meets their evolving need. As we deliver technology solutions faster with more flexible, extensible and modular components, we will work with Dell to assess full-scale configurations that reflect the IT environments and interoperability challenges facing higher education today,” said Jim Bean, vice president of business development, SunGard Higher Education.

“Our relationship with SunGard Higher Education creates a viable synergy that helps universities and colleges provide the best education experiences to their constituencies,” said John Mullen, vice president and general manager, Education, State and Local Government, Dell.