Governor Brown released his budget plan in January 2013, calling for continued and increased funding of education mostly through additional flexible funds provided through Proposition 30.  Look for an upcoming SIIA State of the States report for a summary of proposals by Governor Brown and governors in the 15 largest states.

The SIIA California State Report is the first in a new SIIA series of reports detailing the educational programs within the largest states.  As the more populous state in the U.S. and the home of Silicon Valley, California is certainly one of the major education technology markets. While funding for education initiatives has been generally tight in California, this report contains valuable information to help companies navigate these murky waters.  This report summarizes the key funding that local districts rely on, including for educational technologies and instructional resources.  It also outlines the state agency structure with specialized programs, contact information, links, and descriptions of certain key policies and procedures such as around instructional materials.

This report is designed to be a one-stop navigation tool for member companies interested in operating within California.  The California State report is available to SIIA members only.  Look for more State Reports and updates from SIIA on our Education Policy Page.  We also encourage members to register for SIIA’s Ed Tech Government Forum, April 9-11 in Washington, DC which will also address the role the of the state in education policy and funding.

Lindsay Harman is Market and Policy Analyst for the SIIA Education Division.

SIIA’s own Karen Billings was a featured speaker and hosted a session on the Vision K-20 project on Thursday, February 8^th. This session focused on the development of the Vision K-20 goals and metrics as well as the results of the 2012 survey. The 2013 survey was launched on February 7^th and educators in attendance were encouraged to participate in the sixth survey cycle.  This session also allowed SIIA to share valuable data with the TCEA community.

SIIA also hosted its member breakfast on Thursday February 8^th and had a turnout of over 25 people who were able to hear about the latest SIIA initiatives, network and enjoy a hearty breakfast. The results of the 2011 Market Survey were presented and the attendees were given a chance to view the full report. Members are encouraged to participate in the 2012 iteration of the survey for a free copy of the report.  The breakfast also highlighted the launch of the Vision K-20 survey and encouraged companies to help us get the word out about the survey to educators.  Opportunities and upcoming events were also highlighted including the Ed Tech Government Forum and the Ed Tech Industry Summit. We hope to see you at the next SIIA member breakfast or event!

Lindsay Harman is Market and Policy Analyst for the SIIA Education Division.

Notable releases from the SIIA January 2013 report include new system framework guidelines and accommodation policies by the two assessment consortia. Also included are studies with data supporting implementation and recommendations to both developers and school districts as they create their plans for the transition to CCSS.

The SIIA monthly series will  contain information on both the major assessment organizations, Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers (PARCC) and Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium (SBAC), as well as on the standards definitions and implementation.  As information is released, it will be added as well, creating a one-stop resource for SIIA members working to ensure their products and services help meet education common core related needs.

Look for more updates by SIIA Education Policy in a month!

Meanwhile, SIIA members can review past SIIA webinars on CCSS, SBAC and PARCC, as well as register for SIIA’s Ed Tech Government Forum, April 9-11 in Washington, DC featuring several sessions addressing these issues.

Lindsay Harman is Market and Policy Analyst for the SIIA Education Division.

“The Transforming Education Through Technology Act is an important step forward in providing our students and educators with the technology supports they need for success in school and in the workplace,” said SIIA President Ken Wasch. “We look forward to working further with Congressman Miller to provide the leadership and investment needed to modernize our educational practices and instructional resources through technology and digital learning.”

SIIA is pleased to be part of a coalition of organizations endorsing the bill, representing K-12 teachers, technology officers, administrators and high-tech companies.

The Transforming Education Through Technology Act would:

• Support and prepare teachers and principals to use technology to redesign curriculum, effectively use real-time data to drive classroom practice, individualize instruction, and increase student engagement;
• Help school districts ensure equitable access to, and effective use of, the technology infrastructure and applications all students need for expanded learning opportunities, online assessment and computer-based curriculum;
• Seed new models of digital learning that help personalize learning, including through curriculum redesign, online communities of practice, and interactive learning simulations; and
• Help states to support their school districts to improve student learning, upgrade assessments, and improve educator preparation and support around technology.

The legislation comes at an important time for the role of technology in education. Common core state standards and online assessments are among the factors driving the need for technology, and educators are asking “how” not “if.” However, the continued budget crunch has left too many schools and students without adequate access. This new bill would go a long way toward addressing those gaps, and SIIA will continue its advocacy for this and related public investments.

Mark Schneiderman is Senior Director of Education Policy at SIIA. Follow the SIIA Policy team on Twitter at @SIIAPolicy

1. Lower Development Costs: Hardware and software tools have improved and costs lowered, and the savings in application development and delivery means reduced prices and higher marginal revenues. Improvements include simpler and more powerful authoring tools, many of them open source, as well as cloud and other hosted models that enable schools and companies to more easily outsource and scale.  
2. Apps Market Dynamics: The proliferation of Apps on various mobile devices provides a more welcoming market environment for educational technology companies. Among these factors is the reduced cost of development and distribution on the various mobile operating systems such as Android and iOS and their app stores (though some revenue sharing models do challenge the equation).
3. Increased Hardware Access & Connectivity: While a digital divide still exists and too many classrooms still rely on a single computer station, student and teacher access (at home and school) has grown many fold over the last decade. Reasons for this include the reduced cost of hardware (driven by Moore’s law), growing support for BYOD (student’s Bringing their Own Device), and recent investments in tablets, electronic whiteboards and other devices.
4. Touch Tablet Ease of Use: Many educators view the touch interface as a game changer for student learning through technology. School (and home) spending bears that out. The platforms provide a simplified user interface for students, a simplified operating system that eases school technical support costs, and a tactile functionality that is both beneficial to younger learners and provides a key pedagogical differentiator from other print and digital mediums. 
5. Educators Asking How, Not If: Educators have crossed the tipping point from asking “if?” technology to asking “how, how much and what?” While luddites still exist and we are a long way from robust integration and effective use, teachers, administrators and policy makers recognize the upside of technology and digital learning and are focused on how to realize the power and promise.
6. The New Normal: Our education system is charged with doing more with less in light of the recent recession and enhanced common, college and career readiness standards. Technology has increased productivity in other sectors, and K12 education is finally looking at technology to supplant and transform, rather than simply to supplement. At the same time, many are leveraging technology for data analytics, customized interventions, and blended learning that shift us from mass-production teaching to the more efficient, mass-customization personalized learning model.
7. Educators as Digital Natives: Interestingly, in the past, it has been more veteran teachers that have gravitated to technology than younger teachers who grew up with technology. This is likely starting to change as the technology use by the young teachers and administrators in their personal (and learning) lives is much more prolific in today’s world of mobile apps, virtual communities and online everything. The education workforce is shifting over rapidly post baby-boom generation, and their technology use will follow.
8. Digital Native Students: Not much need be said. Students are too often disengaged not by the lack of technology but instead by rote lectures and static text. They understand they must be engaged and challenged, and allowed to explore and personalize their learning. They see how technology supports them outside of school. Educators are responding to their demand to bring that robust learning environment into their curriculum or risk losing too many more students to boredom.
9. Expanded Distribution: While the proliferation of channels — technology platforms as well as consumer forums — can be a challenge for developers, these will be outweighed by the benefits. Mobile devices and app stores are increasing access and reducing consumer risk. Formal and informal learning are blending as parents and non-school learning providers gain access to new tools. Teachers are no longer reliant on slow, one-size school or district-wide purchasing decisions, but instead can use a debit account to download a product for just one or a few students. And a number of repositories and social networks are providing single points of information (if not yet a point of sales) for all products (and marketing).
10. Parental Advocacy: Increased parental exposure to learning technologies at home is driving their demand for use at school. While parents were sometimes the road block to school board investments, they are more often now leading the charge.

These differences do not imply that every new product and company will succeed. For better or worse, there are probably too many products on the market relative to the number of average users required for product success. Whether investment is all flowing to the right solutions and the right entrepreneurs is still an open question, but it is undeniable that there is growing demand and opportunity for technology in education.

It is also important to note one related potential market challenge — vendor lock-in of content and data. A dynamic market requires minimized barriers to entry such that (school and individual) users are empowered to seamlessly move among existing and new products with minimal risk. SIIA therefore encourages education decision makers and application developers to invest in interoperability. By creating and demanding applications built on common data, content and API standards, information and resources can be more easily shared and exported among any number of proprietary or open applications, thus reducing the risk to educators of a failed product or company. Such standardization is critical for the maturity, and therefore the growth, of the digital learning market, and will ultimately best serve both education and education providers.

These 10 important developments should encourage today’s developers and investors. While the ed tech bubble may not float ever higher, a burst is not likely this time around.

Mark Schneiderman is Senior Director of Education Policy at SIIA. Follow the Education Division on Twitter at @SIIAEducation.

DHS Releases Continuous Monitoring RFQ:  In cybersecurity news, DHS, working through GSA, released a final RFQ this week seeking bids to meet requirements  of the new Continuous Diagnostic and Mitigation program and for continuous monitoring as-a-service.  The BPA includes 15 tools and 11 task areas aimed at improving DHS’s IT security.  The BPA has an estimated value of $6 billion and responses are due January 28, 2013. Federal News Radio has the details.

PSIG Members Featured in 10^th Anniversary of the E-Gov Act Event:  This week marked the 10^th anniversary of the E-Gov Act and SIIA PSIG Members Doug Bourgeois of VMware, Mark Forman of Government Transaction Services and David Mihalchik of Google all were featured prominently in the event marking the anniversary.  Other SIIA members were included as well, including Dan Chenok of IBM and former Congressman Tom Davis, now of Deloitte.  C Span covered the event, which focused on the advances made in government technology since passage of the E-Gov Act.  See the video here.

 Appian Receives FISMA Moderate Certification from GSA:  Appian announced this week that it had received FISMA moderate certification from the General Services Administration for a major business process management application, built on Appian Cloud.  Appian Cloud is built on Amazon Web Services.  See the press release for more information.

Federal News Radio to host live chat with CBP CIO:  Our friends at Federal News Radio are hosting a live chat on January 3^rd at 11am with DHS Customs and Border Protection CIO Charlie Armstrong and are encouraging interested parties to submit questions in advance.  See the link for more details.

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.

  Name: Gunnar Hellekson
  Title: Chief Technology Strategist
Company: Red Hat

Gunnar Hellekson is the Chief Technology Strategist for Red Hat’s US Public Sector group, where he works with systems integrators and government agencies to encourage the use of open source software in government. He is co-chair of Open Source for America and one of Federal Computer Week’s Fed 100 for 2010. He is also an active member of the Military Open Source working group, the Freedom 2 Connect Technical Council, New America’s California Civic Innovation Project Advisory Council, and the CivicCommons Board of Advisors. He is especially interested in cross-domain security, edge innovation, and interagency collaboration through the open source model.

Home town: Honolulu, Hawaii

First job: Slaving away on an AS/400 for Louis Vuitton’s Honolulu operation when I was in high school.

What are you currently reading? “Industry and Empire”, by E.J. Hobsbawn

All-time favorite music: Reggae. I’m from Hawaii, so that’s mandatory.

What is the best meal you have had recently? The “Heather” from Taco Deli in Austin.

What is your next (dream) career? I’m doing it right now.

Hobbies: My wife, my dog, and fancy cocktails.

What do you think is the hot button issue for the software & services industry going into 2013? The elimination of customization and craftwork, and the introduction of standardization and automation.

Rhianna: Welcome to SIIA! Tell me a little about LiquidPlanner and what makes you unique in the Project Management market.

Liz: LiquidPlanner is unique because it is the only project management software to offer a bold new approach to scheduling. We call it “priority-based scheduling,” and it’s not only easier, but also far more accurate than traditional project management solutions based on the Gantt chart. Our robust scheduling engine actually automates much of the manual work that traditionally falls to project managers. In fact, our customers report their teams save an average of 16 hours a month from the automation benefits provided by LiquidPlanner.

Here’s how it works. In LiquidPlanner, you give tasks “best case / worst case” estimates and put them in priority order. Then LiquidPlanner automatically calculates for you an expected completion date for each task and for the project as a whole, based on who the work is assigned to and how much availability they have. Unlike other project management solutions, LiquidPlanner does not allow you to overbook a team member, so the results are based on real world availability of resources. Because projects and tasks are prioritized in rank order, you can instantly see when a change to one project impacts another – something that is impossible with most other tools.

LiquidPlanner also offers time tracking, collaboration, analytics, mobile apps, and more, all delivered through the cloud. We launched the company in 2008 and have over 1,200 customers in 50+ countries worldwide, many of whom are software, IT, and creative organizations.

Rhianna: How do you think the Project Management space has evolved in the last 3-5 years and what trends are driving that evolution?

Liz: The general proliferation of SaaS-based business tools has been transformative for the project management industry. Shared, collaborative systems are now the norm, in contrast to the time just a few years ago when the project manager alone held the keys to the castle. It’s resulting in a new “democratization of project data,” where information on workload, estimation accuracy, and tracking is now available to all members of the team. That means team members can get a barometric read on their own performance relative to others, not to mention better insight into their own contributions, areas for improvement, and roadmap of responsibility. Now, the onus is on vendors to provide solutions that are easier to use, so each team member themselves can update the project workspace without the need for a specialized project manager in the IT department. The trend of SaaS-based project management also means executives are getting unprecedented visibility into capacity and their ability to deliver products and services. I think you’ll see more and more businesses reporting internal cost savings from smarter project management tools.

Rhianna: You do a lot to ensure security and support with your solution. Can you tell us a little about the measure you take to ensure overall security and support of your solutions?

Liz: One of the great things about the SaaS model is that software providers live and die by the quality of service they offer. Naturally, we go to great lengths to ensure end-to-end security and reliability, from authenticating every user account via email to using SSL technology for server authentication and data encryption. We manage our own servers at a world-class data center here in Seattle. In addition to tight physical security measures, it’s architected to protect against hardware and software failure with redundant power and internet connections, hot failover servers, nightly off-site data backups, and 24/7/365 monitoring.

Rhianna: You recently took over the CEO position, having previously held the COO role at LiquidPlanner. What is your vision for the future of the company?

Liz: It’s an incredibly exciting time at LiquidPlanner. We’re really entering the second era of LiquidPlanner’s life as a company. The first five years were dedicated to R&D – we set out to tackle a really big, hard problem and disrupt an old and stagnant market. During this period, we essentially bootstrapped the company to profitability and established a loyal customer base around the world. Today, LiquidPlanner has more than 1,100 paying customers in 50 countries across multiple industries and the company was named one of “Washington’s Best WorkPlaces” by the Puget Sound Business Journal. The next phase for LiquidPlanner is all about driving the company’s growth and extending our platform. We see so many opportunities to help teams tackle increasingly complex projects in today’s competitive business environment, and we are investing heavily in social productivity innovation to meet this growing demand. My vision is that LiquidPlanner becomes a component of the must-have business software toolkit for businesses of all sizes, alongside industry leaders like Salesforce, Zendesk, and Box. We’re lucky to be doing business in a time when innovation, quality, and service are rewarded – on those grounds we are very solid. I’m extremely bullish on the future.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.

Rhianna: Tell me about Recurly. What makes your billing management solution unique?

Dan: Recurly was designed from day one to provide a subscription billing management as a ‘self-serve’ offering. Every single design decision since the first day had this approach in mind – from our application architecture, to our APIs, our interface design and even our pricing and overall transparency of our service. This has afforded us a tremendous competitive advantage, because our application itself is our greatest sales tool. In our business, establishing trust with our customers is a very large part of customer acquisition, and there is no better way to quickly accomplish that than by NOT hiding anything, and by delighting our customers within the first 60 seconds after signup.

Rhianna: You have been particularly successful aligning yourself with strong channel partners. What makes a strong channel partner for Recurly and why are these partnerships core to your business?

Dan: Recurring billing is a painful thing for companies to get set up and operating smoothly. We do everything we can to eliminate payments-related jargon, and to reduce the amount of time and effort required to deliver value to our customers. Our customers are able to go live in days, rather than months required from other enterprise solutions. For channel partners, this means that our service can also be resold very easily because it is designed to be a ‘light-touch, high velocity’ sale.

We have found two distinct kinds of channel partners to date:

1.  Marketplaces – [Ex. Recurly powers billing for Salesforce's AppExchange Checkout] https://vimeo.com/40358739
2. Merchant Services Providers – [Ex. Recurly is partnered with TSYS, which has hundreds of salespeople seeking to solve problems for merchants on a daily basis]

The best channel partners are those that share a common passion for helping our mutual customers succeed. In addition, the best partnerships tend to emerge out of a ‘value-sharing’ disposition, rather than a ‘value-capture’ mindset. We always seek to align ourselves with companies that value relationships and show a willingness to invest in growing them over time.

Rhianna: You refer to your solution as “bought not sold”, a formula many other companies would love to have. Did you ever think it would take this direction when you founded the company?

Dan: As a ‘Pay-As-You-Go’ service, we don’t require our customers to enter into long-term, unpleasant contracts. This creates a very different construct from the very early stages of the conversation. For example, if a customer has a set of requirements that we cannot support, we are the first to acknowledge that. We’d rather lose the business than sign up a customer that will be disappointed 60 days later.
By offering Recurly on a month-to-month, pay-as-you-go model, we know that if we disappoint our customers on any level, they are free to leave us at any time. (In fact, one of our core promises to our customers is that we will make it easy to migrate should they ever decide to leave us. We never hold their data hostage – and this only accelerates our goodwill with our customers). This immediately engenders trust because it shows that we have confidence in our offering, and we have nothing to hide. There is a bit of an implied guarantee to our customers with this approach.

Many of our original customers are now getting acquired by larger companies, or individuals are moving to senior posts within new companies, and their positive opinions of Recurly are being carried with them. This is very pleasing to see customer goodwill working as our most effective marketing tool.

Rhianna: Is it true that you can get subscriptions up and running on a website in just days? Even with custom integrations?

Dan: Our customers move from sign-up to production on average in less than a week. Highly customized integrations require several weeks at most. We provide tools to easily integrate PCI compliant checkout forms into our customers’ websites. When publicly traded companies come to us, their legal teams require more time to review documents than it takes developers and product people to get ready for launch.

Rhianna: There is a lot of competition in the subscription billing space today. Where do you think this market is headed in the next 12-18 months?

Dan: The market is growing incredibly quickly. With the costs of storage, bandwidth and computing power all declining together, the distribution model for applications and services has naturally followed suit. With this change in the distribution model, pricing models have naturally evolved towards ‘pay-as-you-go’, (subscription or recurring) billing models. In this new world, you pay for what you consume, or ‘pay to play’.

Cloud and SaaS services are by definition offered on a ‘pay-as-you-go’ basis. Digital content, media, and entertainment are also increasingly offered on either a ‘pay per download’ or subscription basis.

Purchasing psychology of consumers has also evolved. As recently as 5-10 years ago, companies felt that they had to own every last aspect of their own operations in house. During this same era, we were also still buying music CDs in music stores and storing them on our shelves.

Today, companies are increasingly comfortable with ‘renting’ capacity via cloud services, along with renting ‘expertise’ that simply isn’t cost-effective to own internally. Subscription billing fits into this latter category. When you consider the total cost of ownership for enduring PCI audits, as well as the enterprise risk of storing customer credit cards, this category becomes one of the first areas to be considered for outsourcing to experts.

We couldn’t be more excited about this market opportunity and the overall future for Recurly.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.

Companies are looking for ways to drive lasting marketplace advantage, with innovation becoming the key driver of business success. In this pre-recorded webcast, Vanessa Alvarez, Cloud Thought Leader & Director of Product Marketing at Gridstore talks with Lauren States, Vice President, CTO, IBM Corporate Strategy in an interview format.  They explore how cloud and this new era of computing is fostering innovation and changing the structure of businesses and markets, and how the use of cloud technologies can enable IT to move out of the data center and into the fabric of the business.

About the Presenters:

Lauren States
As Vice President, Technology Strategy, Growth Initiatives and CTO for Cloud Computing on the IBM Corporate Strategy team, Lauren is responsible for the technology strategy for IBM’s growth initiatives, including cloud computing, Smarter Planet, business analytics and emerging markets. In her previous role in the IBM Software Group, Lauren engaged directly with clients to deliver leading edge cloud solutions globally. She joined IBM as a systems engineer after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School.

Vanessa Alvarez
Vanessa Alvarez is the director of product marketing and an accomplished technology professional. Alvarez focuses on the go to market strategy for Gridstore’s award winning solution, the Grid. Previously, Alvarez was an analyst with Forrester Research, focused on next generation enterprise infrastructure and emerging technologies. She advised Fortune 500 enterprises on how to best leverage their IT environment to enable their competitive advantage, through the deployment of emerging technologies and operational models.