Core EOS is built for Edtech Auth
The global education technology market is a fast growing and extremely interesting $85 Billion dollar industry that is quickly evolving. There are a lot of facets to this industry that the larger market is still trying to understand or categorize. There are more obvious areas such as the K12 Software space currently worth $25 Billion. But there are less obvious areas such e-learning, which can be anything from remote education software in corporate settings to uplift employee skills, to the now globally ubiquitous constant of remote primary education thanks to the impact of Covid. Add to this mix higher education focused software providers, human capital management solutions, ERPs, and more and you have quite a dynamic and diverse set of players all competing in unexpected ways.
One clear indication of this unexpected evolution is through the sheer volume of M&A activity. At United Effects, our initial research into this area indicated that from 2020 to Q1/2022 there were nearly 600 M&A deals. Right now, there is a big trend for well-funded mid-sized edtech companies to begin a massive acquisition strategy toward fast-paced growth.
It's a lucrative growth strategy when it works, though it’s hard to make work. At United Effects, we have first-hand experience with the associated challenges. Three of our founding team were part of a highly successful edtech company that followed this exact same strategy, rapidly growing before achieving a billion dollar unicorn acquisition in 2016. To be clear, this didn’t stop that company’s growth trajectory and they continued acquiring about 5 or more companies per year afterwards.
As I said, there are many technical challenges in the wholesale continuous integration of a never ending stream of acquisitions. But one of the first and most important is the challenges of authentication and authorization. I personally have had to solve this problem several times at a few different companies and I can tell you that the most expensive and interesting challenge came from the edtech example I mentioned.
Let me paint a picture:
- Thousands of customers (districts or entities), each of whom may want their own federated SSO options and self-service tooling
- Thousands of district or corporate administrators needing specialized access to add or remove employees or students
- Millions of users comprised of students, employees, and other personas
- Multiple new products with unique pools of users that may overlap email addresses with other products, all of which need to be merged
- A hybrid approach to self-registered b2c apps and administered b2b apps
- The paradox that your customers express a desire to manage all aspects of the users they manage while your users demand self-service and control over their personal information
- The need to account for a consortium or franchise model for resellers of your software
- Disjointed permissions/access models that now need to be merged and simplified so your customers don’t have to define the same role over and over and over just because you convinced them to buy more solutions
Does any of this sound familiar?
My team and I have had to design a solution with these requirements in mind before at the company I mentioned. At that time, I did what every reader of this post probably would suggest, and reached out to the big names in Identity Management. One of the biggest (no need to name them), was my goto at the time. This company has a fantastically documented SSO solution that seemed like a no-brainer. They were also significantly less expensive than their nearest competitor, a company that would go on to acquire them some years later.
We started a POC and were annoyed to realize that at the end of the day, their platform was simply not designed for this digital transformation style, technology enablement, common single experience platform solution that we were building for our customers. They could handle the engine of OpenID Connect based integration with federation to a number of other solutions along with social logins, but they were not optimized to solve the other issues on our list. Instead, we were going to have to design a broad development effort around their product to solve the problem.
As an aside, at my next company 5 years later (2021), I assumed they would have made strides that would let me reduce the effort and reached out again. They had not.
So there we were, with a plan that was going to take roughly 18-24 months to implement (executives are already freaked out), and now we needed a quote for the central element of our solution.
Millions. It was going to be millions per year. Out of respect for the company and because if you really want you can figure out who it was, I won’t say how many millions. But millions of dollars a year to this provider, plus millions more in dev, just to START solving this problem.
I knew right then and there that I could do this better. And, when I founded United Effects, my team and I did. We built the solution we wished we had back then.
Any of the huge number of SSO providers can give you login and simple roles. At United Effects, we differ from ALL of these companies, include the big names like Auth0, Okta, ForgeRock, Ping, Stytch, and others, in one simple way:
We aren’t just solving login and access, we’re helping you integrate your edtech solutions at a reasonable price with a deep understanding of your specific challenges and industry needs.
Our solution Core EOS is built for Edtech Auth.
You can find out more at unitedeffects.com and when you’re ready, let us show you how this works so you can see it for yourself: Book a Demo
Follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Medium and if you need help with anything related to Core EOS, do not hesitate to reach out to help@unitedeffects.com.
