Growth through acquisition carries significant cultural and technical challenges for companies, as discussed in this Tambellini post on Ellucian’s acquisition of CampusLogic. Watermark, Heliocampus, and EAB must also compete with Anthology, which offers a near-comprehensive-if not fully integrated-marketplace for educational technology products. Student success vendor EAB recently rebranded and began aggressively marketing its analytics platform, Edify.

Heliocampus, known for its enterprise analytics platform, strengthened its IE support by acquiring ABC Insights and AEFIS. Watermark is just the latest of several companies to recognize the opportunity afforded through these institutional partnerships. The technology needs of cross-functional student success teams intersect at institutional outcomes management, student analytics, and advising and retention case management. (See this Tambellini blog post for more on how CIOs can support student success initiatives.)

Successful initiatives strengthen student engagement, support, and risk mitigation through standardized data governance, technologies, and best practices across campus. This interest surfaces through cross-functional student success initiatives, which have regained urgency and top-down support in 2020 and the initial onset of COVID. In the past several years, the growing interest in student analytics across IE and student success leadership have brought the two groups closer together. These distinct sets of activities require different skill sets and technologies, making their shared purpose almost unrecognizable in practice. Conversely, student success staff are often advisors who focus on individual student performance, wellbeing, and navigation through the institution. It monitors student retention and success at the institutional level. IE staff focus on institutional outcomes and inputs into student success, like faculty performance, course and program evaluation, and assessment management. Philosophically, IE and student success are two sides of the same coin. In other words, Watermark is cultivating cross-functional appeal and, as such, has the potential to help knock down institutional silos surrounding student data and support. What makes the company’s choice of Aviso Retention interesting is that the solution brings Watermark one step closer to closing the technology gaps between IE and student success work on campus. It took several years to establish a unified brand and interface across acquisitions, and Watermark is still aggressively working to fully integrate and standardize security across offerings. Watermark’s original goal was to create a robust and integrated institutional effectiveness (IE) portfolio to facilitate one-stop institutional shopping. Within its first year of business, Watermark announced two new products but also acquired Digital Measures (faculty information management), EvaluationKIT (course evaluations), and SmartCatalog (curriculum management) to round out its offerings. It began as the merger of three market leaders in assessment management (Taskstream, TK20, and LiveText). The company has consistently grown through acquisition. At first glance, this announcement does not indicate a new strategy for Watermark. Last week Watermark announced its latest acquisition, Aviso Retention, a student success solution that supports case management, predictive analytics, early alerts, and student notifications to mitigate risks to retention.

Watermark insights