Allison Duquette, President of MAXIMUS Education Systems Division, discusses the progress of her company and its top products.
ESD: Tell our readers about MAXIMUS. What’s the company’s main line of business?
AD: MAXIMUS is one of America's leading government-services companies devoted to providing program management, consulting and information-technology services. The company has more than 5,200 employees located in more than 220 offices in the United States, Canada and Australia. SchoolMAX, our industry-leading Web-based student-information system, is one of MAXIMUS’ most strategic product offerings.
ESD: What makes your company unique?
AD: MAXIMUS, being a leader in implementing large, complex business-process and technology solutions, is uniquely qualified to solve the student-information system challenges of the nation’s largest school districts.
ESD: Where is your current product emphasis?
AD: Our current product emphasis is on continuing to develop our SchoolMAX Enterprise product. We are experiencing swelling interest in our robust scheduling capabilities—particularly our master-schedule builder—which will solve many of the challenges faced by unified districts. The product is a completely Web-based application that can be securely accessed from any location that has Internet access, so the SchoolMAX Enterprise reporting capabilities are also of interest to districts that want to put access to real-time information about students into the hands of their teachers, to enable them to make informed instructional decisions.
ESD: What distinguishes your products from the competition?
AD: Our proven scalability and robust feature set are our greatest points of difference. We made the decision several years ago to build SchoolMAX Enterprise to meet the needs of the largest school districts in the United States. Having successfully done that, we are now able to offer an ASP [or SaaS] version—based on this same architecture—that can appeal to districts of any size. Offering both a self-hosted version or a MAXIMUS-hosted version of the product lets a district make the best technology decision for its specific requirements.
ESD: Compare the position of your products and their technology against the current market.
AD: Our products are built on the Oracle database. This gives us superior scalability and security compared to any other database infrastructure. It also gives us and our customers the opportunity to integrate seamlessly into other Oracle products which are prevalent in school districts, such as Oracle Business, Oracle Financials, Oracle Business Intelligence, etc.
ESD: How do you see the next year in terms of economy, sales, technology and product evolution?
AD: We are poised to have tremendous success over the next 12 months. Our technology will continue to lead the pack in terms of scalability and feature set; we will continue to see increasing demand for SchoolMAX Enterprise due to the aging of existing client/server technology; and we will continue to fulfill that demand with world-class implementation and customer support.
ESD: To what do you attribute your company’s success?
AD: Our success is based on a strong track record of product innovation, implementation success and product support. However, we are never satisfied with the status quo and we’ll continue to invest in each of these areas to ensure we remain the premier choice to solve the challenges of the nation’s most-complex and demanding school districts.
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