Kuali Rice project gains dedicated resources with announcement of investing partners

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 30, 2009

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. --For a growing number of colleges and universities, Kuali Rice represents more than the underpinnings to core Kuali applications—it will also be the framework that is used to build any campus application in an agile fashion. Kuali Rice empowers developers to react to end-user business requirements in an efficient and productive manner that in turn facilitates the production and delivery of high quality business applications for all Carnegie-class institutions.

Prior to fall 2008, the Kuali Rice effort was supported by voluntary resources from the Kuali application projects and had no formalized governance structure. With this announcement of investing partners, the Kuali Foundation has created a governance structure for the Kuali Rice project. In addition, Kuali Rice now has an explicit funding model and dedicated resources for its ongoing sustainability and enhancement.

The Kuali Rice investing partners are the University of California San Diego, the University of Washington, Iowa State University, the University of Arizona, the University of Maryland, Indiana University, Cornell University and Innovativ Consulting Partners.

Kuali Rice provides an enterprise-class suite of integrated software products—known as middleware—that is the foundation for Kuali enterprise applications such as the Kuali Financial System (KFS), Kuali Coeus (KC) for Research Administration, Kuali Student (KS), and others to come. Kuali Rice is built with service oriented architecture (SOA) concepts in mind. Specifically, developers are able to build robust systems with service contracts, customizable and configurable user interfaces with a clean and universal look and feel, common enterprise workflow functionality, and general notification features to allow for a consolidated list of end user "action items.”

“Many institutions who had been watching Kuali with great interest, but aren’t in need of new ERP implementations presently, are finding that Kuali Rice can help them solve real campus needs quickly with minimal risk and much lower investment than replacing a component of their ERP,” noted Chris Coppola, CEO of rSmart and one of the initial Kuali Rice board members.

The Kuali Foundation and the Kuali application communities have reaffirmed their commitment to Kuali Rice as the technical infrastructure and middleware solution for all Kuali software.  Rice will evolve to serve all current and future projects, and will continue to provide a framework for application development beyond the core Kuali applications.

Eric Westfall,  Indiana University, was named as Project Manager of the Kuali Rice project starting January 1, 2009. Release 1.0 of Kuali Rice is expected to be delivered in late spring 2009.

For more information, see rice.kuali.org