UC San Diego invests in Kuali Rice Project August 28, 2008
Media contacts:
Pat JaCoby, 858 534-7404 or pjacoby@ucsd.edu
Jennifer Foutty, 812 345-3948 or jfoutty@kuali.org
The University of California, San Diego has joined the Kuali Foundation as an investing partner in the Kuali Rice Project. The Kuali Foundation is a non-profit organization that coordinates the efforts of colleges and universities to sustain and evolve a comprehensive suite of administrative software that meets the needs of all Carnegie Class institutions.
"The importance of a common technology framework for higher education and, particularly, for the University of California campuses was critical to our decision to invest in Kuali Rice. This will enable us to develop new UC-wide and campus applications using the same framework, as well as position us for using Kuali Application software if and when we decide to do so," said Elazar Harel, assistant vice chancellor for Administrative Computing & Telecommunications at UC San Diego. "UCSD has developed a sophisticated state-of-the-art framework over the past few years and we are happy to contribute our knowledge and code to the Kuali Rice initiative."
UC San Diego joins over 20 other university investing partners including Cornell University; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; University of California campuses at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine and Santa Barbara; Michigan State University; Florida State University; University of Arizona; University of Maryland College Park; University of British Columbia; Indiana University; University of Southern California; and Colorado State University. Commercial affiliates include Exeter, Huron Consulting, IBM, Sun, rSmart, and Syntel Inc.
"We are excited to become a member of the Kuali Rice Project and our team is eager to begin contributing to and benefiting from the efforts of the entire Kuali community," Harel said.
"UC San Diego is an ideal partner for the Kuali Rice work," said Brad Wheeler, chairman of the Kuali Foundation and Vice President for Information Technology at Indiana University. "Every college and university is now sorting its plans for enterprise integration no matter what systems they currently use. UC San Diego's investment to create the software future that they need in concert with other universities is exemplary of this century's approach to enterprise systems."
Nestled along the Pacific Ocean on 1,200 acres of coastal woodland, UC San Diego is a powerful magnet for those seeking a fresh, next-generation approach to education and research. Since its founding almost five decades ago, UC San Diego-one of 10 campuses in the world-renowned University of California system-has rapidly achieved the status as one of the top institutions in the nation for higher education and research.
Kuali began in 2004 as a cooperative effort among seven partners and a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to develop an open-source, community-owned financial system. Success with joint development of Kuali Financial System has led to three other pooled investment projects with coordination by the independent, not-for-profit Kuali Foundation Inc. The software of Kuali projects is freely available under the Educational Community License to anyone for any use or modification without fee.