The next sure thing in life, after death and taxes, is paperwork. Few can escape the doldrums. Even technology executives like Hardeep Gulati finds himself filling out reams of forms when enrolling his child at the local public school.
Paper and pen aren’t disappearing anytime soon. But the chief executive of PowerSchool hopes to make the student enrollment process less arduous. Gulati's company has acquired InfoSnap, a developer of online tools that help parents streamline registrations for a range of school services including student enrollment, meals and sports.
Founded in 2000, InfoSnap also offers a digital “school choice” tool that allows parents to rank their preferences when given the option, as well as a digital lottery used by charter schools to determine which student will get to attend. Over 10,000 PreK-12 schools currently use its services.
This is the first major move by PowerSchool since it was sold by its former owner, Pearson, for $350 million to Vista Equity Partners in June 2015.
The two companies in the deal have become acquainted familiar over the past five years. InfoSnap is one of 150-plus partners in PowerSchool’s Independent Software Vendor program, which invites third-party companies to integrate their data services with PowerSchool’s student information system (SIS).
With three million students on its platform, InfoSnap will help PowerSchool expand upon its 25 percent share of the SIS market. The deal is sure to raise alarm bells for competitors—both SIS companies and others offering enrollment tools such as Schoolmint, an upstart that currently serves 1.4 million students. Even though PowerSchool claims more than 40 million users across 73 countries, Gulati estimates that “70 to 80 percent of our customers do not have a digital enrollment solution.”
Approximately 40 percent of InfoSnap’s existing customers also use other SIS providers, including Sunguard and Skyguard. For now, PowerSchool assures its competitors they should have no cause for concern, saying that it will commit to supporting and expanding InfoSnap product integrations with other SIS products.“Our goal is to provide the same level of openness to other systems,” says Gulati. “We want to make InfoSnap a posterchild for how well it can work with other SIS.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed. InfoSnap charges districts upwards of $20,000 per year for its services. Over 100 employees from InfoSnap will be joining the PowerSchool team.
