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Jeffery Young, a writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education, explains a new business venture for Internet2, a company providing superfast networks to colleges and universities. Internet2 recently announced partnerships with a variety of new companies in an effort to offer colleges and universities cloud services at reduced prices. The premise behind the new services, called Internet2 Net + Services, is to allow the 235 participating colleges and universities to access cloud services for a lower cost than they would normally receive as an individual institution. Companies involved in the new venture include Hewlett-Packard, SHI International, and Box. While Hewlett-Packard and SHI International are providing special offers on licensing terms and time bought on high-speed computers used through the internet, Box offers storage within the cloud.  The long-term cost savings for colleges and universities using Internet2 Net + Services could be rather substantial. Instead of having to invest in the services permanently, institutions can purchase additional capacity during peak times. Short-term rental of cloud services, at discounted rates, may have real financial impact on higher education, perhaps even enticing some to transition to using the cloud.

This article introduces the reader to the concept of collective bargaining for campus information technology by considering the 2011 announcement of a partnership between desktop computer giant Hewlett Packard (HP) and higher education consortium Internet2. Collective bargaining is not viewed as the norm for higher education where individual colleges prefer to act as individuals, each perceiving themselves as completely unique even among peer institutions, but it has taken root in recent years due to a need to regain control over campus IT services in the wake of a surge in consumer technology use among faculty, staff and students. The cost benefit of collective bargaining is aimed at campus IT consumers but clearly there is a significant benefit for the IT providers as well, in this case, for HP. At the time this article was written, many colleges and universities were struggling to rebalance campus budgets, including reigning in IT costs. Meanwhile, consumer electronics were booming as smartphone sales surpassed standard cell phone sales and laptops outpaced desktop sales, and the war in tablet computing raged between Apple iPads, Amazon's Kindle Fire, and Google's Nexus 7. Students, faculty and staff were walking onto campus with multiple web enabled devices, draining campus Internet services and changing the way campus hardware was used. With more mobile services being used and aging desktop clusters needing to be managed, campus IT had to start thinking about strategies to control its investments. Cloud technologies were gaining in popularity at the time, and this article outlines the ways in which campuses began moving to the cloud to cut costs and to meet evolving user needs. The partnerships described in the article between companies like HP and cloud hosting service Box and Internet2 schools show that there are benefits to the members, but the author also recognizes that faculty, students and staff will likely continue to utilize their own devices and