“Apple will sell PowerSchool, its division that develops student information systems for K-12 school districts, to Pearson Assessments,” Nick dePlume reports for Think Secret.
“The companies have yet to announce the sale, which will be effective June 1. Apple informed PowerSchool employees of the sale yesterday morning. Terms of the deal are not known,” dePlume reports. Apple purchased PowerSchool “for $62 million in stock, a play intended to strengthen the Mac maker’s hold on K-12 education… PowerSchool continued to grow under Apple’s watch, and today the software is used by thousands of school districts. The product is a three-time winner of the Software and Information Industry Association’s CODiE award for the best K-12 SIS. But the PowerSchool division had a turbulent life at Apple after the acquisition.”
“Pearson Assessments, a division of education publishing giant Pearson Education, is a provider of data collection and assessment/scoring tools. The company’s products include its own student information system, SASI,” dePlume reports. “Pearson Education is a part of London-based media company Pearson. The conglomerate’s holdings include the Penguin book publishing group and the Financial Times.”
Full article here.
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But shouldn’t they change the name to MacSchool first?
Only if it is universal.
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Never heard of it, but sounds like a good move.
Simplification has so far been the key for
Apple’s resurgence.
PowerSchool has had many ups and downs, layoffs, awards, etc. I’m not surprised by this announcement.
End the soap opera.
Pearson and SASI? Hey, anybody know whatever happened to SASIxp?
Re: SASIxp
That is strange. Their site has press releases on SASIxp and nothing else. Unless I missed it.
What kind of turbulence?
I work in education, in my region SASI is being replaced by Infinite Campus at many school districts. It is a web based product much like PowerSchool. I’ve used both, and they are pretty good with Infinite Campus having an edge because of it scalability (SQL). My guess is that Pearson has seen it’s marketshare decrease and needs an SIS system to compete, hence the aquisition of Powerschool.
BTW, MacSchool is a product that was widely used by Mac based districts and is made by Chancery software. They too have lost share because they were slow to develop a web based product.
You don’t know the history of MacSchool…I do.
Definitely better for the people working in the Powerschool division
Michael Jacson, you sick fock.
Perhaps this heralds the development of some kind of iSchool suite…
Hmmm.??
Does this mean that Apple is abandoning the school market?
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Does this mean that Apple is losing cash so bad that its having to sell off its lessor assets??
Does this mean that Apple is having such technological problems that it needs all its engineers just to keep iPod and Mac afloat??
Does this mean that Apple is ……… ah heck, I am tired of this game. You try a few. lol
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N.
Yeah Norm, you’re right.
Apple lost the 10 billion in the bank just last week and they need the cash bad. Apparently they haven’t paid their suppliers for months and now it is catching up with them.
Thought it was too good to be true
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*burp*
“Apple lost the 10 billion in the bank just last week and they need the cash bad. Apparently they haven’t paid their suppliers for months and now it is catching up with them.”
How It Happened – Steve’s Lost Weekend in Vegas with his 300 pound Samoan attorney:
Steve Jobs, a bottle of tequila, nine shots of Goldschlager, a click wheel tattoo (funnier at the time), and $10 billion in chips.
scene: Roulette wheel at the Luxor Hotel and Casino (pyramid was as close to a cube as Steve could find)
Steve: “Put it all on red,” and then whispers, “And don’t tell the Board (giggle) especially that know-it-all Gore. He can’t keep his shouth mutt (giggle-snort)!”
Norm,
Apple has over $8 billion in the bank. They are a debt-free company! They sold off this division because it was a pain in the @$$ to maintain. I just hope they don’t lose their educational edge – that is where the future computer users are.
I’m a user in a 10,000 student district…….
SASIxp has morphed into CenterPoint, a web-based management system that allows parents access to updated student records and grades.
SASIxp was a piece of junk client-server system that had the unique capacity of bringing down entire networks during one of its frequent server crashes. It would even lock up every machine logged in during a crash. It had some nice features, including seating charts with pictures and pretty useful student info reporting. It also had a habit of crashing and burning while grades were being recorded and processes.
CenterPoint is the current iteration. Pearson apparently purchased it and the company that produced it to replace SASI. Good news: the web-based system doesn’t seem to be able to crash networks. Bad news: it breaks down a lot, again often during heavy use like grade reporting. It also sucks. I’ve been using electronic grading since the Apple ][+ days, and I’ve never seen such a primitive grade management system.
We’ve heard good things about PowerSchool. I hope Pearson is able to make good use of this new resource.
NOoooOOOoooOOOOO!
MDN Word Cut!