University of Technology Sydney completes ambitious digital transformation project

The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) has completed an ambitious digital transformation project to streamline administrative processes and enhance student experiences. The Australian university tapped the managed cloud services at intelligent integration and automation company Boomi to modernize its technology environment and create a data-centric ecosystem.

UTS’ bold digital transformation plan

UTS enrols more than 40,000 students, creating copious data for the university to store, orchestrate and use to power decisions and programs. Underpinned by its competitive goals to attract and retain students, the university embarked on one of its largest digital transformation projects to date.

Establishing scalable connectivity between digital systems was critical to fulfilling the university’s plan. “In April this year, we migrated our formerly on-premises core student management platform to the cloud,” said Anthony Heiler, head of enterprise platforms at UTS. This made the University’s Technology One Student Management system its first major user of Boomi Managed Cloud Services (MCS), a multi-tenant cloud platform optimized for data integration in Amazon Web Services (AWS). “It was a huge piece of work, requiring a rejig of 400 integrations,” Heiler added.

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Focusing on automation

UTS has gained fast, scalable and hands-off access to cloud services through MCS, freeing the organization from configuration and monitoring work, according to a press release. This has enabled UTS to focus on automating processes, formerly a burden to the business.

“Rather than maintaining integrations, we’ve invested in building integrations that bolster students’ experiences,” said Helier. “For example, it used to take 16 days to ratify student grades. We’ve now brought that process down to 24 hours, which is a huge feat for 40,000 students. According to student services, we’re receiving fewer support tickets, which is a victory for clerical overhead and student happiness.”

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Boosting competitiveness and scaling data traffic

MCS has become a lifeline that runs through the university, bolstering its competitiveness and enabling it to efficiently scale and process data traffic, according to Heiler. 

“Throughout a semester, UTS processes up to 10,000 documents per day, but in an enrolment week, this peaks at 300,000 documents. It’s at this time students log in and submit timetable requests, typically within the same hour. This isn’t a burden anymore,” said Heiler. 

Since the implementation of Boomi’s MCS, UTS has gained the power to scale and process the data traffic, while maintaining uptime. “Our technology decisions are essentially helping students secure classes with their friends, which keeps them engaged and enthusiastic.”

As the competition between universities intensifies, there’s simply no scope for administrative headaches in the classroom, nor the IT room, added David Irecki, chief technology officer (CTO), APJ at Boomi. “By investing in the intelligence and simplicity of its data framework, UTS has not only strengthened its front-facing ability to attract and retain students, but added strength to its back-end IT environment as the university expands.”

Cloud-native momentum is growing

Cloud-native momentum is growing, with organizations increasingly seeking to modernize systems to bridge infrastructure gaps, ensure long-term scalability and efficiency. That’s according to the latest Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) from Nutanix, which examines the state of global enterprise cloud adoption and containerization trends.

It found that, as enterprises accelerate their cloud-native transformation, containerization is becoming the backbone of modern application development. However, gaps in Kubernetes adoption and persistent data silos indicate that many organizations are still struggling to operationalize these technologies at scale. 

To bridge these shortcomings, businesses must take a strategic approach to modernization, starting with a resilient hybrid multi-cloud infrastructure that enables secure, scalable and efficient operations. A unified cloud operating model can break down data silos, enhance governance and streamline workload portability across on-premises, public and private clouds.

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