It IS incredibly expensive to perform these integrations on an ad hoc basis. That's the advantage of having a standard. I personally find this entire thread ex

It IS incredibly expensive to perform these integrations on an ad hoc basis. That's the advantage of having a standard. I personally find this entire thread extremely interesting, and enjo's comment gets to the heart of it. <Reader alert - I work for SIF> Now here's my source of confusion. We are an non-profit standards organization with an open standard (written and approved by our members) that can be used without cost by all K-12 end users and vendors (members or not), and with no IP agreement to sign. True there is an optional product certification program, but that involves only a nominal fee to cover our costs. The SIF Certification program was created to support our end users who often demand products undergo SIF certification to ensure they will seamlessly interoperate (ideally out of the box - but there are a LOT of reasons including optional data elements, why things are often not that simple). The Clever folks know what I’m talking about ... or they will soon. In earlier SIF releases, when the infrastructure was basically home grown, several integrators wrote what we call “agents” which allowed vendors (including vendors of SIS, Library, Transportation and more recently Assessment and LMS related systems) to essentially enable their applications run in SIF interoperability Zones without changing a line of code. For example some agents use internal application database triggers to detect data changes the application publishes. There are several free open source SIF Agent toolkits available today for SIF 2 and we expect the same for SIF 3 where the fact that the infrastructure is now based on REST will make things a lot easier. So we finally reach my question. Some very smart people have invested $10 million dollars in Clever, but the stated business model seems (in SIF terms) to be to: • Create and establish an API to retrieve data from SIS applications and • Sell SIS vendors the agent software to allow them to utilize that API. If that’s essentially correct (and if not, I would ask a Clever representative to correct me) than given our own experiences I just don’t understand how such a strategy can be effectively monetized to provide an acceptable return on such a large initial investment. And I’m particularly interested, because if I knew how to do that, I’d try and get my employers to do that too! :-)