Two technology companies with ties to Philadelphia have partnered to make it easier for college students to receive financial aid.

Two Montgomery County-based IT companies, Unisys, the venerable Blue Bell technology services and consulting provider, and Boomi, the fast-growing Conshohocken software systems integrator, are developing scholarship payment systems for California state universities. We have partnered to speed up the process.

They hope this will become a lucrative model for future deals.

Under the new agreement, 450,000 students in the California State University system will have immediate access to student aid, California State University Vice Chancellor Nathan Evans said in a statement. Currently, this process can take up to a month as applications go through multiple systems.

Once a computer maker that competed with IBM, Unisys now sells cloud server solutions and other computing infrastructure and services to longtime customers. That includes California State University, where the company uses PeopleSoft and Oracle systems to link records at 23 campuses around the nation's most populous state.

Since 2019, Unisys “has done a lot of work to modernize our infrastructure and bring it into the cloud,” said Mike Thomson, Unisys president and chief operating officer. “Then Bhumi came to us and started getting financial aid to students quickly, instead of weeks or months of getting papers into the system. . Now it’s almost real time.”

Boomi executive Josh Rutberg said Boomi's software integration allows the state financial aid office (which awards grants to about 30% of California State University students annually) to respond to requests in “real time” and award aid funds. It is said that the distribution can be speeded up.

Boomi and Unisys' agreement immediately updates the process of searching for grant information, copying and transferring files, and processing data, which California officials called “manual, labor-intensive, and multi-step” for several weeks. and replace it with a reply.

Ed Clark, California State University's chief information officer, predicted the new arrangement would also help reduce dropouts because more students would pay their bills before the deadline.

Nine of the campuses have already been connected under the new agreement, and the remaining 14 campuses are expected to follow this spring.

Next, Unisys' Thomson said the company wants to translate Cal State textbooks and exam materials into multiple languages ​​and move them online to reach more students. He added that “California State University will be our poster child” in the new push to sell higher education.

What are Bhoomi and Unisys?

Boomi employs about 1,800 people worldwide, including 200 at its new headquarters on Fayette Street in Conshohocken, and claims to have more than 20,000 users.

The company was founded in 2000 and was once based in rented space in a pizza shop in Conshohocken, but grew rapidly during the years it was owned by computer company Dell US. Boomi was acquired by private equity investors Francisco Partners and his TPG in 2021 and has since added his 500 staff in the US, India, Canada and other countries. Total sales this year are expected to be about $500 million.

Unisys traces its roots to early manufacturers of typewriters, mainframe computers, and other business machines and has approximately 18,000 employees worldwide. That includes 500 Bluebell employees on a campus that previously housed computer manufacturing and maintenance operations but is now mostly occupied by other companies.

Although Unisys' revenue has fallen from $3 billion a decade ago to about $2 billion these days, CEO Peter Altabev said in a recent interview that Unisys is a company that has been working with major software providers and specialty software integrators such as Boomi. Through this partnership, they have re-established themselves as a growing company. .

Thomson said Unisys “remains an engineering company at heart.” “The cultural mindset of this company is still very much in manufacturing. What we do is very solution-focused.”

“We continue to reinvent ourselves,” added Dwayne Allen, Unisys' chief technology officer.