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 a digital transformation project to modernise its technology environment and create a data-centric ecosystem, designed to promote the student experience.

Establishing scalable connectivity between digital systems was critical to fulfilling the university's plan. UTS introduced Boomi Managed Cloud Services (MCS) - a multi-tenant cloud platform optimised for data integration in Amazon Web Services (AWS). This became the foundation for one of the university’s largest technology projects to date.

“In April this year, we migrated our formerly on-premises core student management platform to the cloud, making Technology One our first major user of MCS,” said Anthony Heiler, Head of Enterprise Platforms at UTS. “It was a huge piece of work, requiring a rejig of 400 integrations. Yet, this was practically a non-event, which was a huge relief to the organisation. Because we worked with Boomi to ensure MCS was ‘right sized’ to handle the load, students didn’t feel a thing.”

Through MCS, UTS gains fast, scalable, and hands-off access to cloud services, freeing the organisation from any work in configuring, monitoring, and managing Boomi processes. This means Heiler’s team has been able 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. 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. And according to student services, we’re receiving fewer support tickets, which is a victory for clerical overhead and student happiness,” said Heiler.

The MCS implementation scales the university’s use of the Boomi’s platform, which was first introduced in 2018 to establish a singular view of data. Today, the Boomi-connected environment creates visibility over UTS’ student, operational, and research data, linking its Technology One Student Management system and Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM), among other platforms.

Jennifer Leech, Senior Platform Manager Integration, ITU Enterprise Platforms at UTS said, “We were highly impressed with Boomi‘s support during our migration from Boomi on-prem to Boomi MCS. Their team collaborated closely with the UTS Integration Team to ensure the MCS platform met the university’s diverse workload requirements. The platform has been a tremendous success for UTS, and we are excited to leverage the new capabilities Boomi has introduced in the APIM space.”

According to Heiler, Boomi is a lifeline that runs through the university, which bolsters its competitiveness.

“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. But this isn’t a burden anymore,” said Heiler. “Since Boomi, we’ve earned the power to scale and process the data traffic, while maintaining uptime. So, our technology decisions are essentially helping students secure classes with their friends, which keeps them engaged and enthusiastic.”

David Irecki, Chief Technology Officer, APJ at Boomi, said, “As the competition between universities intensifies, there’s simply no scope for administrative headaches in the classroom, nor the IT room. 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.”