Why Australian Universities Are Ditching Legacy Platforms (And What They're Building Instead)

Every Australian university we've spoken to in the past two years has the same problem: their digital infrastructure was built in a different era, and it's actively hurting the student experience.

We're not talking about LMS platforms like Canvas or Blackboard. Those are entrenched for a reason. We're talking about everything else: short course marketplaces, club management, event systems, merchandise stores, student portals, and the dozens of micro-platforms that universities cobble together from enterprise vendors, Google Forms, and prayer.

The real cost of legacy systems

The problem isn't just that these systems are old. It's that they create a compounding tax on everything the university tries to do digitally:

• Student frustration: Students expect consumer-grade UX. They get forms that look like they were designed in 2008.
• Staff overhead: Manual data entry between disconnected systems. CSV exports emailed between departments. Hours lost every week.
• Vendor lock-in: Platforms built by vendors who charge $50,000 for minor changes. No access to your own data without a support ticket.
• Security risk: Unpatched systems, outdated dependencies, no modern authentication. Every legacy platform is a liability.
• Innovation paralysis: Every new initiative requires a new procurement cycle, a new vendor evaluation, and 6 months of committee meetings.

What modern university platforms look like

The universities that are getting this right are building (or commissioning) custom platforms that solve their specific problems. Not buying another enterprise license. Building.

Unified student experience

One login. One interface. Courses, clubs, events, merchandise, communications. Students shouldn't need five different accounts to participate in university life.

Self-service administration

Staff should be able to create courses, manage clubs, process orders, and pull reports without submitting IT tickets. Modern CMS interfaces make this possible.

Modern payment processing

Stripe, not manual invoicing. Automatic receipts, refund handling, and financial reporting that integrates with university accounting systems.

Mobile-first design

Students live on their phones. If your platform doesn't work beautifully on mobile, it doesn't work.

The shared development model

Here's what makes this financially viable: universities don't need to build everything from scratch individually.

At Sonder, we're building a platform architecture that can be customised and deployed across multiple institutions. RMIT gets features funded by other universities. Other universities get features funded by RMIT. Development costs are distributed, but each institution gets a deployment tailored to their specific needs.

This isn't SaaS. You own your deployment, your data, and your customisations. But you benefit from a shared development velocity that no single university budget could achieve alone.

What to look for in a development partner

1. University experience: Have they actually shipped a platform for a university? Not a website. A platform with users, payments, and integrations.
2. Procurement literacy: Do they understand your approval process, or will they ghost you after the first committee meeting?
3. Ownership model: Do you own the code? Can you leave? Or are you buying another decade of vendor dependency?
4. Ongoing partnership: Will they maintain and evolve the platform, or disappear after launch?

The bottom line

Australian universities are spending millions on digital infrastructure that makes students and staff miserable. The alternative isn't more enterprise licenses. It's custom platforms built by people who understand both the technology and the institutional context.

The universities that figure this out first will have a genuine competitive advantage in student experience, operational efficiency, and institutional agility. The ones that don't will keep emailing CSV files between departments and wondering why enrolment numbers are flat.