MIS MARKET MOVES WINTER 2024: A Change Is Gonna Come

DISCLAIMER: I have past and possibly future commercial relationships with a number of MIS vendors and their investors. I'm also a co-founder of two assessment ventures - Smartgrade and Carousel - that exist in markets adjacent to the MIS. Nonetheless I aim to write this blog impartially, from the perspective of a neutral observer. This matters to me - it's basically the blog I wish had existed back when I was a MAT senior leader trying to get a handle on who the key players were in the MIS market. 

Anyway, when I'm not blogging or leading my ventures, I provide MIS market consulting and data to investors, and offer free, informal consultations on MIS procurement and assessment strategy to MATs. If you would like to discuss any of this, contact me via LinkedIn. 

There are basically two types of readers of this blog:

1. People who want to know the latest data on the English state school MIS market, because it's in some way relevant to their job.
2. People who have at most a tangential interest in MIS, but who enjoy niche puns and arcane musical references.

This Christmas, I'm feeling whimsical, and so I'm going to pander to the second group. But before I get into it, I just want to apologise to you if you're in group 1. Typically the members of this tribe are busy people: investors in edtech for example, or overworked data managers. The kind of people who are right now wondering if it's really too much to ask for hard data unadorned with silliness. So if that's you, I can only apologise in advance. 

If you're in group 2 however, I have excellent news, because this Christmas, I'm telling you the story of the latest MIS market data through song titles. First, as always, you get a pretty set of charts, followed by nine tunes that attempt to capture What's Going On.

1. A Change Is Gonna Come

Every time I write this blog I need to find new ways to say Arbor / The Key are bossing the MIS market. Arbor now sit at over 6,500 schools, and perhaps even more notably, if you tot up all schools purchasing a MIS from The Key (i.e. customers of Arbor, Integris and ScholarPack) you get 9,444 schools in total - just 142 short of the SIMS total! That means that barring a remarkable turnaround in fortunes, the next time I blog I'm going to be talking about The Key as the English state school market leader. They also keep broadening their offer: earlier this year they announced the acquisition of FEPS, providers of HR software and services, offering an indication that they see this as a strategic area for future growth. 

Now, to be fair, The Key's seemingly imminent coronation as market leaders is only the case if you're measuring the market by number of schools. If you instead consider market share in terms of the number of pupils at the schools served by vendors, SIMS is on 47%, vs 36% for The Key. On this measure, Bromcom also do better, with their share shaking out at 15% by pupils vs 11% by number of schools. So perhaps a more accurate (but less snappy) title for this blog would be: "A Change Is Gonna Come, Or Isn't, Depending On The Metric You Use". 

2. Half Yourself? A Merry Little Christmas.

In 2014, by my records, SIMS served 18,247 English state schools. In the latest data, they're at 9,586. So not quite half yet... but close. 

What's more, by my calculations they've lost a little under 1,500 schools in the past year, up from around 1,200 in the previous year. SIMS only need to lose another 500 or so schools to have fewer than half the schools of their 2014 peak. If current trends hold, that'll happen within the next six months. 

Now, that doesn't mean SIMS is doomed, of course. Trends can change, and the SIMS team are busy developing SIMS Next Gen, which they describe as "The best cloud MIS in education". The roadmap is available online, and it shows all modules being ready by the end of 2026. So I guess a lot depends on how their remaining customers - and future prospective customers - view this product, and it's certainly too soon to come to a verdict on that based on data alone.

But, as befits the song title of this section, let's be Frank: the loss of 13.5% of the customer base from the previous year does not yet indicate any form of renaissance yet. Moreover, there are other considerations that could foreshadow another difficult year ahead. Reportedly, lots of SIMS schools are on 3 year contracts which started in April 2022, meaning 2025 will bring about those schools' first chance to exit their agreements for some time. The big question for SIMS is therefore how many of these can they hold on to? I'll have data on that in summer 2025, so we'll know soon enough!

3. You Win Again.

The metric I always use to work out who's winning is what percentage of all switching schools schools did each vendor win? And for Arbor, the rate is 76%; (their best ever),. The savvy among you may wonder if this is artificially boosted by schools switching from other products owned by The Key, but I looked into that, and even if you remove those they're winning 73%. 

That's the sixth year in a row that Arbor have had the highest win % amongst vendors, and the fourth in a row where they've been over 50%. Truly, all they do is win win win no matter what what what.

4. Belfast Child.

The English state school numbers don't always do Bromcom full justice. Sure, they're by some distance the next fastest growing MIS after Arbor, with around 2,500 schools in this segment of the market and a decent enough win rate of 21%. But the Simple Minds who look at those details along will assume they're forever in Arbor's shadow - and they'd be wong.

That's because the biggest story of the past year for this company is how they've fared outside England. In January 2024, the Northern Ireland Education Authority announced that Bromcom had won a contract to provide a MIS to their 1,100 schools. Yep, Bromcom won a whole country! 

They've also made some important gains in Wales, with Wrexham announcing that they're moving wholesale to Bromcom. Surely it can only be a matter of time before renowned actor and Wrexham AFC owner Ryan Reynolds rocks up at BETT on the Bromcom stand? And with most other Welsh LAs still being on SIMS, Bromcom will be doing all they can to make further inroads west of Hereford.

One other interesting nugget about Bromcom is that they do best in England with large MATs. For groups with 25+ schools, Bromcom has a 30% market share, vs 39% for Arbor and 21% for SIMS. This reinforces the perception that they're most likely to win when the procurement exercise is bigger and more complex.

5. In Between Days.

It's hard to know what to say about IRIS. On the one hand, they're now a bona fide challenger MIS. They've had 100+ schools for over a year, and that's my benchmark for when a vendor has properly become established in the market. They're also still growing, so things are going in the right direction.

That said, the pace of growth in the past year is likely lower than they'd have wanted. They're now at 113 schools (121 if you include iSAMS, their sister MIS), up from 105 (115 inc. iSAMS) the previous year. That's a significant slow-down in the annual rate of growth (8% increase in the past year vs 40% the year before). So while they're not exactly looking sickly, they still need to find The Cure for this year's relative stagnation to cement themselves as a viable alternative to the big 3.

6. I've got schools, they're multiplying.

In Spring 2023 I wrote about how Compass Education had achieved an eye-popping 300% term-on-term growth rate... by growing from 1 to 4 schools. Building on my past experience as a management consultant, I did some whizzy maths and projected that at this rate "in 2028 they will be working with over a billion schools." Well, you might have laughed at me then, but this year has seen them grow from 7 to 30 schools. That's a growth rate of over 300%, so I feel VINDICATED. Admittedly this is an annual rate whereas previously I was citing a termly metric, but still, I maintain that Compass's race to 1 billion is still on.

7. Papa's got a brand new bag.

Hoo boy, am I glad to see Satchel enter the MIS market! You can only imagine how much time I've wasted over the years trying to come up with puns for Arbor and Bromcom - but there's really just not much there to work with. Satchel, on the other hand, offer a whole world of bag-themed plays on words to explore. 

And more importantly, if you're a MIS purchaser, they give you another intriguing alternative to build into your procurement process. A significant chunk of secondary schools already use Satchel One, the homework and learning platform, so the company has an inbuilt advantage when launching their MIS product, in that they already have a commercial relationship many prospective customers. I'll be intrigued to see how their market share evolves in the coming years.

One other mildly interesting thing to note about Satchel is that they originally burst onto the UK scene under the Show My Homework brand. Their pitch as I remember it was that they DIDN'T have lots of modules, unlike the sprawling and clunky incumbent learning platforms of the day. They did one thing, but they did it jolly well. Over time that strategy evolved as they became Satchel, a platform combining lots of modules. Now, they're having a crack at competing in the broadest edtech category out there: a full MIS! I think their story tells you quite a lot about how edtech has evolved over the past decade. There was a time when it was ok to be a narrow product doing one thing well, but increasingly, customers, management teams and investors are backing fewer, broader vendors to do a range of things for them.

8. I'm still standing.

It's not been an easy few years for Juniper in the MIS market. They acquired Pupil Asset in 2020, and then launched a new MIS called Horizons in 2022. The combined Pupil Asset+Horizons share of schools now stands at 284, down from 467 in 2021. However, they're very much still in the fight, having launched a brand new MIS called Juniper MIS this term. Come back next year to see how that product has fared in its first year on the market...

9. Ready to die.

... But when you do come back, you won't find me talking about Advanced Learning anymore. The company announced almost two years ago that they would go end of life by August 2023, so honestly, I was surprised it took until now for the last of their schools to disappear from the England state school dataset. But they are now gone, so I guess the last time I'll mention them. Let's have a minute's silence for their ill-starred products: Facility CMIS and Cloud School (formerly Progresso). CMIS in particular will be fondly remembered by some veteran data managers out there, who enjoyed building MacGyver-esque customisations on top of their flexible (if anachronistic) database. Still, it's fair to say that their days have been numbered for a while. There was once a time when it seemed like they would be a Biggie, but in the end they didn't even manage to sustain being Smalls.

MIS MARKET MOVES (Spring 2024): good news for Bromcom; bad news for lovers of dataviz

DISCLAIMER: I have past - and who knows, maybe future! - commercial relationships with a number of MIS vendors. I'm also a co-founder of two assessment ventures - Smartgrade and Carousel - that exist in markets adjacent to the MIS. Nonetheless I aim to write this blog impartially, from the perspective of a neutral observer. This matters to me - it's basically the blog I wish had existed back when I was a MAT senior leader trying to get a handle on MIS and edtech. I also now provide MIS market consulting and data as a service and offer free, informal consultations on MIS procurement to schools and MATs. If you would like to discuss any of this, contact me via Twitter or LinkedIn. 

I love a good data visualisation: a revealing chart can really make a story pop. That's why I usually like to prepare these blogs using Tableau.

But this term, the UK MIS biggest story doesn't lend itself so well to charting. In January 2024, Bromcom announced that they'd been selected to replace SIMS as the MIS for all 1,100 schools in Northern Ireland. There's currently no other opportunity in the UK that covers 1,000+ schools in a single contract, so this was a BIG DEAL in MIS-world and the win is a credit to the Bromcom team. They're showing signs of being the front runner when bigger, more complex deals come up, like the 2022 West Sussex procurement, for example.

But bringing things back to me for a second, selfishly, this news makes for terrible dataviz. I mean, I could do a bar chart, but I don't think that's going to help you grasp what's going on. A Sankey would be fun, but not that informative. So for once I'm going to forego the dataviz and just let the numbers speak for themselves. Before this deal, Bromcom had around 2,000 English state schools (I'm guessing there have been a few other private and international schools, but my assumption is that the large majority of their customers are in the English state sector). This deal therefore grows the company's customer base by maybe 50% in one fell swoop. Nice work, Bromley Company!*

Turning now to the English state school market (because I just got my hands on the January 2024 data), here are my three biggest takeaways.

1. Arbor's win ratio keeps going up up up
By my calculations, Arbor won 454 schools in the period between October 2023 and January 2024. The other vendors combined won 53 schools. I think the best way to illustrate what's going on here is to look at Arbor's win rate compared to everyone else:

In 2019, Arbor won 30-40% of schools each term. In the last 4 terms, they've never been below 69% and in the most recent term they achieved a somewhat remarkable win-rate of 90% of switching schools. My first thought was: maybe these are mostly Scholarpack and Integris schools moving over? If so, it would have been less noteworthy given The Key owns all three systems and you'd imagine that over time they'll all end up on the Arbor platform. But on closer inspection, that's not really what's going on. Here's a chart of Arbor's wins, colour-coded by the vendor the school is leaving:

What jumps out is that over 300 schools have joined Arbor from SIMS in each of the past 3 terms. ScholarPack and Integris switches are growing in volume, but they still only account for 25% of the total number. So however you look at it, those Arbor folks are doing a lot of winning of schools that were up for grabs to allcomers.

2. For the first time since (my) records began, SIMS are serving under half of England's state schools.

In 2018, 78% of English state schools used SIMS. That share is now down to 49%. Contrast that with The Key, who over the same period have risen from 5% (at that time they had recently acquired ScholarPack but didn't yet own Arbor) to 39%. It's therefore no longer accurate to describe SIMS as the dominant market participant. They're still the biggest, but not by that much, and they no longer have a majority.

3. Horizons are in a bit of a slump
I can't see any schools won by Horizons since the summer term of 2023, and in the most recent term they lost another 25 schools, taking them to 404 in total. That's their third consecutive term of decline, having peaked at 503 schools in early 2023. 400+ schools is still a solid base (the closest challenger is IRIS, with 118 schools), but the team there will no doubt be aiming to reverse their fortunes asap. 

* I often get asked "Why are they called Bromcom?" Well, my understanding is that it's because their HQ is in BROMley, and they make software for COMputers. So I'm afraid it has nothing to do with the subgenre of films that includes Superbad or Dude, Where's My Car?, despite what you were perhaps hoping.

Bad Blood (MIS's version)

I made a new year's resolution to write less about MIS this year, because I have two very cool assessment ventures (Smartgrade and Carousel, thanks for asking) and they're growing fast and keeping me busy... and so imagine my delight when everything started kicking off in MIS world over the past two months. I've held off from blogging about it until now because, look, my comfort zone is writing about - and producing - pretty charts containing data. This blog is not called "Bring More Legal Disputes" for a reason. 

But as Taylor would say, now we got problems, and I'm not sure how we're going to solve them. And neither are you, because people keep DM-ing me to ask me what the hell is going on. So I've decided to set out a timeline of the key events in the words of those who are either directly involved or who I judge to be best placed to comment (Ms. Swift does not make the list). I'm not going to provide my own analysis since there appears to be open and ongoing litigation around these issues, and I think it’s important to let that play out. I'd encourage you to read the statements for yourselves and draw your own conclusions.

So, the timeline:

• In December 2023, SIMS put out a statement saying that "It has recently come to our attention that some customers moving to other MIS suppliers are being incorrectly advised to provide copies of (or access to) their SIMS and/or FMS database to the new provider for the purposes of migrating data to the new system." They went on to say that any third party encouraging usage of backup files "will be inducing [the customer] to breach their contract(s) with ESS."
• This month, Arbor and Bromcom put out their own statements in response. 
• Arbor's said that "many schools feel unable to switch MIS" as a result, and so they're offering an "Arbor Switching Guarantee" that means "Arbor will take legal responsibility when you transfer your school data to us via backup file" and "Arbor will cover the cost of your MIS license until your SIMS contract ends in March 2025".
• Bromcom's said that "If ESS initiate any legal action against schools, Bromcom will offer an indemnity to cover approved legal costs for these schools. Furthermore in the unlikely event that a damages payment to ESS materialises, Bromcom will also take responsibility for this payment." They also said that "Bromcom has applied to the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and is applying to the High Court for an injunction to halt this anti-competitive behaviour by ESS Ltd." 
• SIMS swiftly responded with a blogpost the same day entitled "MIS migrations – setting the story straight". It started by saying "ESS’ intellectual property (IP) is being systematically and unlawfully misused by certain competitors, who are trying to conceal their misuse of ESS’ intellectual property through a smokescreen of allegations of anti-competitor behaviour." It also firmed up the timescales that led to their announcement, stating that "In October 2023, ESS obtained actionable evidence that its IP was being unlawfully used by certain competitors, who have subsequently tried to excuse their actions on the basis that this misuse was required to migrate customers from SIMS to their MIS. Specifically, we established that competitors were inducing our customers to breach their contracts with ESS by providing them with full backup copies of their SIMS databases, which in addition to customer data contain over 1.5 million lines of ESS program code and other valuable ESS IP."
• Bromcom's Chief Commercial Officer Chris Kirk then took to LinkedIn referring to this SIMS blog, and also citing ESS SIMS's submission to the Competition and Markets Authority in 2022 which included these words about the migration process from SIMS to Bromcom: "the Bromcom migration process is made up of .. a final week in which the Bromcom system goes live, data having been copied across from a backup of the school’s SIMS database". Kirk also cited the part of the submission that said "Implementation and migration to a new MIS is an organised and standardised process" and asked how this could be reconciled with SIMS's assertion that they only established that competitors were requesting backups in October 2023.
• SIMS published part 2 of their "setting the story straight" series, which stated that "It suits others to suggest we are making things difficult, but this is not true", and "For more than a decade migrating data from SIMS has been possible using SIMS Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Alternatively, a school can use our reporting facility or work with aggregators such as Wonde or Xporter (previously GroupCall Xporter) to extract the data for them." It also responded on Chris Kirk's point by saying "As long-standing users of the SIMS APIs, ParentPay reasonably assumed that anyone wanting to extract customer data from SIMS would be following the rules and either use SIMS reports, write programs that used the APIs, or engage with aggregators. Our understanding of the migration process was that schools made a backup copy of the SIMS database and then either produced XML reports from this copy or provided an ESS technical integrator with API access to the copy for the purposes of programmatic extraction."
• James Randall (Chief Architect of the SIMS suite from 2011 to 2014) wrote two LinkedIn posts with his views on the SIMS approach. He commented that "I understand what SIMS are doing here is not just banning sharing a backup but also the running of scripts and third party tools and so even doing a data dump is not allowed. The defence to this being that SIMS are "protecting schools" from bad and misinterpreted data. That, to put it bluntly, is the new MIS vendors problem - not SIMS. And is something that could still occur with the "official" API usage (it does get misinterpreted by Partners, of course it does)."
• Schools Week have also been tracking the issue. Their article  includes comments from Stone King, who say they “have been approached by a number of very concerned clients in relation to this issue”. The article quotes Tony Pidgeon, a partner at the firm, saying: “We believe the stance taken by ESS will have a significant impact throughout the sector on the ability of schools to successfully switch provider and we are in the process of reviewing the matter in detail with those clients.”
• Other notable comment has been made by the Finnemores (both previously SIMS employees under the previous owners) and WhichMIS, who have published three recent blogs on the subject.

So that's where we are. I'm not planning to write about every twist and turn as this story develops - when more happens I'm hoping Schools Week will report on it and I'll merrily repost them on all social platforms (with the possible exception of Instagram - my output on there is mostly weak puns and photos of bread I have baked. You probably don't want to follow me on Instagram). Instead, I'll look forward to covering future changes in market share, which of course may well be influenced by how this whole thing plays out...