The Thing That Should Not Be

He watches, lurking beneath the sea
Timeless sleep, has been upset
He awakens: hunter of the shadows is rising

The Thing That Should Not Be, Metallica (1986)

The thing that never happens happened again… again. I’m referring, of course to the Canvas data breach, outage and ransoming. Enthusiasts of Fantasy Ed-Tech Monopoly will recall that Ellucian bought Anthology’s SIS and ERP parts back in January. The pathway by which that happened: Blackboard went public in 2004 and later acquired WebCT (2006) and ANGEL (2009) before it fell into the arms of Anthology in 2021, which also went public in 2004, but was then taken private again in 2011 by Providence Equity Partners, only to be later sold to Veritas Capital in January 2020, before the whole shebang went bankrupt in 2025 to be sold out of receivership to Ellucian by two private equity firms.

The buyer, Ellucian, originated as SunGard in 1983, then passed through the hands of five different private equity firms before buying the other thing that went broke after it bought the other thing that bought all the other things and went broke (i.e. Anthology). As propriety Ed-Tech businesses skid along being shopped to private equity firms and being chopped apart after bankruptcies, the universities come along for the ride, enjoying forceable migrations with all the attendant costs.

A quick back-of-the-envelope review of SUNY’s spending outlays shows the system has been through four different LMS’s in 20 years: from Domino to Angel to Blackboard to Brightspace. Along the way $50mm has been spent for the privilege, $37mm of which went to decommissioned systems. Common sense suggests the hidden tax of three migrations was at least twice the cost of the hardline loss visible in the budget. One can be just as sure there will be more mergers, acquisitions and bankruptcies as they can be sure that each one will have a larger and larger impact on a greater number of institutions as the number of options for LMS providers ever dwindles from those same mergers, acquisitions and bankruptcies…

This week’s wrinkle: security concerns come with all that. It’s a pathetic, but true: OSS offerings cannot be worse, because it’s not possible. Just look at the experience of the last twenty years, or the last three days.