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Synacor, Inc., which was founded in 1998 and is headquartered in Buffalo, NY, is the newest member of the Institute for Business and Information Technology (IBIT). Known for managed portals, advertising solutions, cloud-based identity management, and email and collaboration platforms, Synacor reported a revenue of $143.9 million in 2018, with a high-margin recurring software revenue of $35.8 million.

Himesh Bhise, President & CEO, will represent Synacor in IBIT activities.

Dear colleagues,

It is my pleasure to present the 2017-18 annual report of the Institute for Business and Information Technology (IBIT), Temple University.

The IBIT partnership with nationally recognized member firms and the  IT advisory board is quickly becoming the standard for industry-academic engagement. Please read the report to learn more.

Sincerely,

Munir Mandviwalla
Executive Director

Temple University has a new way to engage students, faculty, and industry in generating digital innovation: the Digital Innovation Foundry (DIF). An Institute for Business and Information Technology project, DIF has launched with $1.27 million in funding thanks to generous corporate and individual donors.

Those collaborating through the Digital Innovation Foundry will assess, integrate, and prototype digital technologies. Industry can engage Temple students and faculty to address challenges they are facing with fresh thinking and a digital-first perspective. (For one project already underway, DIF is helping a company find ways to use software to motivate employees’ professional development). Students will have the opportunity to work first-hand with businesses that are navigating digital transformation, and faculty can conduct design research in an environment that benefits students and industry.

When you work on a project at a company, you need to have all experience levels and different disciplines involved. Similarly, you can’t have something like DIF without real collaboration. Students in all disciplines will benefit,” said IT Advisory Board member Sondra Barbour, who endowed the Persson-Barbour scholarship.

Barbour is a Temple alumna and former Executive Vice President, Information Systems & Global Solutions at Lockheed Martin, and serves on the boards of 3M and Perspecta.

That is a real selling point for industry to work with DIF. You have, in essence, the entire breadth of the university to pull from. This is also a way to ensure we’re sending our graduates out into the corporate world with an experience of collaborating across disciplines.”

A March 18 ribbon-cutting for DIF’s Capgemini Digital Innovation Lab officially opened a tech co-working space on campus. Students, faculty, and external partners can gather at the Lab to collaborate on projects, and assess demonstrations of new innovations.

The mission of the Foundry is closely aligned with Capgemini Invent’s focus on digital innovation and transformation so we are pleased to invest in the new Capgemini Digital Innovation Lab at Temple University. We are confident that the Foundry will further generate digital innovation at Temple and in the region,” said Jonathan Brassington, the head of Capgemini Invent, an IBIT Member.

Niraj Patel, an IT Advisory Board member and the donor behind DIF’s Niraj and Cara Patel Endowed Scholarship Fund, appreciates DIF’s alignment with current industry goals.

Technology will transform every industry. It is exciting to support an initiative that will engage all of Temple’s disciplines to produce digital innovation,” said Patel, who is Managing Director at DMI.

Over a year in the making, DIF offers a chance for industry professionals to step back from day-to-day business demands and envision future innovation. DIF intentionally differs from the business incubator model to allow teams of students, professors, and industry professionals to collaborate on long-term digital innovation projects that focus on the technology first — while still working with a blended mindset of academic research and creative thinking.

Having been on the corporate side for 30-plus years primarily as a Chief Information Officer, I’m well aware that the pressure to constantly make sure there’s a return on investment is very large,” said Bruce Fadem, IT Advisory Board Chair and sponsor of DIF’s Bruce and Betsy Fadem Endowed Scholarship Fund. “So for corporations to be able to take advantage of a facility that already exists, this is a great opportunity.”

As the chair of the Advisory Board, Bruce led the effort to create the Foundry.

All of DIF’s generously funded endowed scholarships will ensure that top-performing students receive necessary financial support.

I believe the scholarship will help attract stronger students and give those students who deserve an education at Temple an opportunity,” said Barbour.

Andrea Anania Stewart’s donation created DIF’s Stewart Family Endowed Scholarship Fund, and she said she is looking forward to seeing what DIF yields.

The Digital Innovation Foundry has a practical, well-thought-out plan to engage students, industry, and faculty, which I am pleased to support,” said Stewart, who is also on the IT Advisory Board.

IBIT’s Advisory Board and Members — including Alexion, AmerisourceBergen, Emtec, NBCUniversal, Pfizer, QVC, and Scholastic — played an important role in bringing this unique capability to Temple.

When it comes to DIF’s future success, Barbour said for her, it’s not necessarily about one splashy breakthrough:

For me, it’s the learning and it’s the figuring out how you take a technology, turn it on its side, create different things, look at the use cases, and really broaden students’ exposure to the realm of possibility.”

Learn more at https://ibit.temple.edu/programs/digital-innovation-foundry/

Top-performing Temple University MIS Students got to see the inner workings of two global companies in November. Pharmaceutical distributor AmerisourceBergen in Conshohocken, Pennsylvania, and educational publisher Scholastic Inc. in New York City, were the inaugural hosts of the Institute for Business and Information Technology’s (IBIT) Company Visits initiative.

These visits bring together business leaders and students at the sites of IBIT members. For a few hours, students tour offices, learn about projects a company is working on, and talk with employees about their careers.

It was amazing to sit at the same table with high-level executives and hear them speak about their experience. Overall, the site visit allowed me to expand my knowledge about the [healthcare] industry as well as my network said MIS student Anastasia Postolati.

Learning how Scholastic Inc. uses technology in publishing showed how diverse a MIS grad’s career options truly are, said Madison Collins.

The November hosts worked closely with IBIT to design their visits, which are also recruiting opportunities. Only students with excellent academic and professional development experience are invited to participate in Company Visits.

It was an absolute delight and inspiring to host the students. They filled me with hope and optimism for the future as prospective leaders of our communities, our businesses and our domestic economy,” said Dale Danilewitz, AmerisourceBergen CIO. Danilewitz, who sits on IBIT’s IT Advisory Board, also said that the students were inquisitive and informative and displayed an air of confidence and sincere appreciation for the opportunity to meet our company leaders while engaging in productive and thought-provoking conversation. They are welcome back any time.

The 6th Annual NBCUniversal Temple University Analytics Challenge attracted more than 135 entries across six colleges, with the first-place finishers coming from Fox School of Business, Klein College of Media and Communications and the Tyler School of Art.

MIS students Jake Green and Rohit Bobby partnered with Klein’s Sergio Aguilar to win the analysis category. Tyler School of Art student Xi (Cynthia) Cheng was the graphics category winner. The first-place finishers took home $2,500. There were also cash prizes for the second and third place winners and two honorable mentions in each category.

“All of the teams put a lot of work into their challenges,” said MIS Assistant Professor Laurel Miller, who organized the event and serves as Director of the Institute for Business and Information Technology. Miller was also a mentor to the three-member analysis team winners and said she was impressed “by how meticulously they looked at each and every angle.”

Teams could choose from three data sets to answer the following questions: The first, from competition sponsor NBCUniversal, asked how media companies align with esports; the second, from global biopharmaceutical company Alexion, sought to learn who the winners and losers were in healthcare funding and payments; the third, from pharmaceutical distributor AmerisourceBergen, questioned why pharmacies buy drugs from non-primary vendors.

This was the first year a sports-related challenge was offered and many teams were drawn to that. Both first place winners took on the NBCUniversal challenge. Graphics winner Cheng used images from Pac-Man and simple synthesizer sounds to look at the overlap between esports viewers and traditional sports fans in her four-minute video. The analysis trio reworked the question, team member Green said, to ask, “What can media companies and specifically, networks such as those powered by NBC sports group do to adapt to the esports audience and remain a leading delivery and engagement platform for sport entertainment?”

“This project taught me so many lessons that will be of value in my future professional endeavors,” Green said. “It taught us to give more with less. It taught us to condense mountains of data and weeks’ worth of information gathering into a four-minute pitch. We had the privilege of coming together as a team in pursuit of a common goal, despite our differences in educational background.”

Aidan Doyle, Alexion’s Director of Data and Analytic Platforms and a first-time competition judge, said he was impressed by the students and the challenges they tackled.

“When I went to college, you signed up for a class, walked into an amphitheater, the professor wrote on a board, you wrote it down and at the end you’d take a test,” said Doyle. “What I see in the system in the US 30 years later, especially at Temple, is a collaborative effort that brings the best ideas together between all faculty while engaging students and industry… To me, it summed up why Temple and other institutions are the place to be.”

Learn more about the Temple University Analytics Challenge.

See all of the winning entries here.