As digital technologies permeate education, academic institutions are partnering with more technology vendors than ever before to meet the learning and training needs of their students and staff. This rampant proliferation of digital assets is paving the way for new problems. CIOs, IT decision-makers, and procurement teams at institutions are daunted by the challenges of managing and distributing digital resources and optimizing associated costs. Moreover, the lack of transparency in software licensing and asset management due to decentralized management and shadow IT is creating concerns related to security, compliance, and data integrity. This situation begs several questions. How do we know which digital resources are being used the most? How can institutions procure those resources in a cost-effective way? And how do they ensure optimal and secure delivery of those resources to students and faculty?

Kivuto is on a mission to solve these problems for academic institutions. With 20 years of experience focused solely on education, Kivuto has designed its Kivuto Cloud platform to meet the highly specific needs of that industry. “Beyond just offering software licenses, our vendor-neutral solution helps clients centrally manage academic resources, including those procured from both solution providers directly and from resellers, in a customized manner,” says Ryan Peatt, Chief Product Officer of Kivuto.

Kivuto Cloud provides users with tailored access to academic offerings from different vendors (such as Microsoft, Adobe, and IBM). Complex business terms are made easy to manage with flexible, customizable, user-based policy enforcement. Digital tools can be managed and distributed to end-users directly through the solution. Students, educators, and staff can authenticate easily and are automatically shown the digital resources they are eligible to access. Flexible payment options built into the solution allow users to complete transactions and start using assets quickly and easily. CIOs and IT teams can track license adoption rates to inform future procurement decisions.

Thousands of academic institutions around the world have already benefited from Kivuto Cloud in different capacities. For example, one Kivuto client was facing challenges managing Adobe licenses. Despite having a preferred vendor and an existing set of licensing rules and policies for Adobe specifically, many departments at the institution had independently purchased Adobe Creative Cloud licenses. Procurement and central IT had little visibility into these purchases, nor into product consumption, as they were happening in isolation, department by department.