How Centralizing IT Resources Helped Austin Community College Streamline Cost Recovery

The Goal

Austin Community College is a leader in providing quality, affordable education and technical training to students looking to get a degree or learn professional skills. The college was looking for an easy way to start offering Adobe Creative Cloud to their constituents, while addressing leadership’s concerns about the high price of volume licensing. The college decided to explore the possibility of recovering some of the costs incurred in the license-distribution process. The IT team was tasked with investigating how this could be done.

The Challenge

• User-Based Pricing
  One of the requirements placed on the IT team was the ability to apply a different price for Adobe Creative Cloud to different types of user. Their cost-recovery model would have to support three distinct price points for three distinct user types. This would require a solution with advanced e-commerce capabilities.
• No Centralized Platform
  Without a centralized platform, the school lacked a means to provide students direct access to the Adobe software at the special rates available to them. This meant students were often purchasing it on their own at a much higher personal expense.

The Solution

Garyn Dunbar, an IT Project Manager at Austin Community College, considered the possibility of developing a solution in-house. However, he ultimately decided against this approach due to the demands it would place on his already busy team. Additionally, the maintenance of an in-house solution would not only require the deployment of extra IT resources but would prove cumbersome and time-consuming in the long run.

Needing a quick solution to the challenges of distributing Adobe Creative Cloud, Garyn asked Adobe for advice. That’s when Adobe recommended Kivuto.

The Result

Austin Community College’s requirements were demanding and complex, and Garyn knew meeting them would be a challenge. Luckily, Kivuto Cloud supports advanced payment methods for end users, including credit card, PayPal, and internal billing codes. After analyzing the product offering, the IT team at Austin Community College were confident that Kivuto had solved their distribution needs. “Having a third party take care of the development and maintenance has definitely been useful”, said Garyn, who added that his favorite part of the Kivuto platform was the flexibility in pricing rules.

In addition to the problems faced by the IT team, the absence of a centralized platform meant that students were often purchasing the software on their own at a great personal expense. As a result, they were missing out on the advantages of having great academic tools at their disposal anytime, anywhere. Austin Community College can now offer their students great learning resources on a single centralized platform that is as secure as it is user friendly. The consolidated, central portal significantly simplified tasks for staff and faculty too, making administrative work and collaboration quick and convenient.

Kivuto’s efficient, secure, and streamlined service saved the IT team valuable time, cost, and effort, allowing them to better focus on their core tasks. And thanks to the robust reporting capabilities of the Kivuto platform, Austin Community College can track the number of downloads by students, enabling them to make data-driven decisions as they plan future strategy.

“Leadership requested a complicated billing process, and Kivuto was able to support it. We were quite impressed that the rules were loaded correctly, and no issues came up in testing.”

Garyn Dunbar, IT Project Manager, Austin Community College

About Kivuto

For over 20 years, Kivuto has transformed the way academic software is pioneered and delivered. Today, Kivuto streamlines academic software and digital resources in one central platform, providing students, faculty, and staff with a one-stop shop to seamlessly access their resources. For more information, visit www.kivuto.com.

About Kivuto Cloud

Manage, distribute, and recover costs on any digital resource in a single cloud-based platform. Kivuto Cloud removes the challenges of resource and license management. For more information, visit www.kivuto.com/cloud.