ELive 2025 was an exciting event packed with important announcements and updates that will undoubtedly shape Ellucian products for the better.
During the first keynote of the conference, President & CEO Laura Ipsen announced Ellucian’s “reimagined brand,” established on “excellence, experience, [and] expertise.” Sometimes, a rebrand is just a marketing exercise — but not this time. It aligns with the much-clarified vision of the Ellucian SaaS Platform’s coming maturity. Though that maturity is still some distance away (likely 2 years in our estimation), there is already enough in release that on-premises or managed Banner customers can see a significantly improved ecosystem and a platform they can extend and improve over time.
Kicking off the conference’s second keynote, Chief Product Officer Mike Wulff shared that, “Ellucian always starts with student,” announcing the rebranding of “Ellucian Student powered by Banner and Colleague.” To support its rebranding and redefined Ellucian Student offering, Ellucian team members shared key updates and roadmap items influencing an array of Ellucian products and capabilities.
The SaaS platform has new and expanded services, including Intelligent Processes (workflow and automation), Forms, Business Rule Engine, Communicate (Beta in Q3), Document Management (Beta), Schema and API Designers (Banner Beta), and User Provisioning (Beta for Banner). Existing solutions are also seeing investment and expansion, including Insights, Ethos, and Data Connect.
These solutions are essential for developing a comprehensive SaaS platform and progressively enhancing functionality and user experience beyond the current Banner and Colleague interfaces. The clarified vision of the full platform capability marks the right time to rebrand Ellucian Student (powered by Colleague and Banner) and reduce the complexity of buying many modules by rolling them all into one SKU for Student.
Financial Reporting on Ellucian Insights is a significant advancement for Ellucian, complementing its development of the Insights SaaS data and reporting platform. Ellucian’s focus on expanding and improving APIs highlights its ongoing effort to make Banner and Colleague more extensible via the SaaS Platform. While the buildout of Experience cards for HCM and Finance remains limited, Student is clearly Ellucian’s priority. Additionally, partners such as Strata Decision Technology (formerly Syntellis) Axiom, and ESM continue to deepen their integration into the SaaS platform.
Ellucian introduced new features spanning the student lifecycle. CRM Recruit will soon offer a general integration with Insights, while Insights’ integration with Apply is currently in beta. Additionally, CRM Advise will gain an integration with Insights and enhanced Experience Cards. Plus, Smart Plan (formerly EduNav), which utilizes AI to keep students on track, is now generally available within Ellucian’s CRM Advise platform. CRM Advance will receive accessibility updates and Ethos improvements.
Furthermore, Ellucian Transfer will soon be available to customers, aiming to improve the transfer process for students and institutions. Ellucian Transfer is expected to be generally available in the first half of 2026. CRM Recruit, Advise, and Advance will feature a Unified Interface designed to provide a more modern experience across Ellucian’s CRM products. Lastly, Ellucian will end support for its Classic Interface by this winter.
Ellucian’s strategy in relation to partners is beginning to show progress. Partners are preparing to take on the primary role in implementation as they ramp up their expertise and team sizes to align with the massive number of institutions that need to make the move to SaaS. Ellucian is also quickly advancing its SaaS implementation methodology and tools to meet institutions’ migration needs.
Ellucian AI and Data team members shared Ellucian’s vision and roadmap for AI. Ellucian has created an AI acceleration team, with one team focusing on machine learning (ML) and the other on generative AI (GenAI) across the user experience. Additionally, the Ellucian team is developing various AI assistants to enhance users’ productivity and efficiency. AI Assistants on Ellucian’s roadmap include an AI writing assistant that can draft content for users, which will be the first major platform capability and is expected to be in beta by Q2. Furthermore, Ellucian is working on an Insights analytics assistant, which is expected to be released in the second half of the year. It will enhance user experience in Ellucian Insights by recommending dashboards and filtering content.
Additionally, Ellucian has released Journey, its continuing education solution that utilizes AI to address skills-based learning and is currently available for customers. Journey is the first product to be released by Ellucian’s internal Incubation team. This team is focused on out-of-band experimentation and new technologies to build products, and Journey is evidence of a well-executed plan. Ellucian Experience will also see new features, including a virtual student advisor.
Ellucian’s investment in its unified platform was evident, and its rebranding of Ellucian Student has launched at a critical moment. While speaking with institutions, we encountered a wide array of opinions and evidence of both challenging implementations and significant gains in Ellucian’s implementation methodology. Some institutions are resistant to being forced to adopt SaaS, while others are beginning to move forward, recognizing the significant progress Ellucian has made on the platform. Partners are enthusiastic about the platform’s ability to seamlessly operate as a core component of Ellucian SaaS, rather than merely offering integrated solutions, and are working towards deeper alignment.
As we zoom out the lens viewing all the activity at ELive, we can see significant product investment and progress, maturation of Ellucian’s approach to institutional success, and a gradual turn of institutional attitude towards moving to SaaS. Ellucian’s success over the next 12-24 months hinges on its ability to deliver as it continues to build on its promising technological infrastructure, partnerships, and methodologies to enable large-scale adoption of the SaaS platform.
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