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Flinders University leverages Dell Boomi platform for connected cloud strategy

Announcement posted by Boomi 12 Sep 2017

Five-year digital strategy will see the Adelaide-based university use iPaaS to support cloud migration objectives, enable personalised education
Sydney, AustraliaSept. 12, 2017Dell Boomi (Boomi) has announced that Flinders University is using the Boomi integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) to enable a connected environment as it begins to execute its five-year digital strategy through to 2021.
 
The primary objective driving the Adelaide-based University’s strategy is to provide a personalised and customised education experience to each of its 26,000 students throughout their entire journey – from prospect to graduate. Flinders is migrating its applications to the cloud to enable this.
 
Flinders will also leverage the Boomi Master Data Management (MDM) Cloud, managed from the same Boomi integration platform, so it can accurately map this journey by ensuring data is consistent and up-to-date across a diverse range of applications regardless of where the data was initially collected.
 
“Flinders’ digital strategy will result in the widespread use of cloud services to optimise and enhance learning for our students no matter the study they are completing,” said Kelvin McCarthy, Solution Architect, Information and Digital Solutions, Flinders University. “But introducing cloud-based apps is just the first step. We need a way to connect those apps with one another so we can provide a unified experience for users – that’s where Boomi comes in.
 
“Boomi’s integration capabilities ensure these apps operate concurrently and consistently so that students can learn through a modernised environment that is accessible on their terms – on mobile, at any time, and from any location.”
 
Flinders selected Boomi following a tender process in which it went to market looking for a combination of traditional ESB-style integration, APIs, and MDM. Boomi was the only vendor that could provide these capabilities in a true cloud environment; competing products only offer managed services, with software located on-premises and fed through a third party data centre.
 
Having completed various minor back-end integrations, Flinders’ first major project involves the migration of its Student Management System (SMS) from on-premises to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) version. The project will require more than 100 Boomi integration points to replace legacy integrations that were coded up to 10 years ago.
 
Due to the low-code design of the Boomi platform, Flinders’ Information and Digital Services division is able to focus on the business outcomes and drivers related to technology, data and analytics while deploying the integrations. This not only spares resources, but it allows the team to focus on the University’s top priority: delivering better outcomes to students.
 
Future phases of Flinders’ Boomi project will see it use the Boomi MDM Cloud - launched in Australia in July – to aggregate student data from multiple sources.
 
“If we can’t understand the student, what stage in their learning journey they are, and what they need, we can’t optimise the services we offer them, nor can we propose further opportunities,” McCarthy said.
 
“We have the Student Management System, Learning Management System, alumni management system and a plethora of other applications which contain chunks of information about every student. That’s a lot of data, and if it isn’t synchronised, it can cause significant conflicts. With Boomi, we can have confidence in data accuracy as all information stored by our apps will be handled by the MDM platform in the cloud. This type of accuracy and real-time access helps us better understand the student journey, and will become increasingly important the further we progress along our digital roadmap.”
 
As well as creating an automated, central data repository, these MDM capabilities will play a prominent part in Flinders’ adoption of learning analytics as it works toward becoming a world leader in the practice by 2025.
 
“Today’s students, most of whom would be digital natives, expect more than competency-based learning – they want a unique, tech-enabled experience that fits their aspirations and is shaped around their schedules,” said Michael Evans, Managing Director APJ, Dell Boomi. “Using Boomi’s cloud-native platform to connect applications and maintain data integrity, Flinders can analyse the needs of its students and seamlessly align the learning experiences it offers to those demands.”
 
About Dell Boomi
Dell Boomi (Boomi), an independent business unit of Dell, is the leading provider of cloud integration and workflow automation to build The Connected Business. Boomi helps more than 6,000 organisations accelerate business agility by connecting data and applications to run faster and smarter. Visit http://www.boomi.com for more information.
                                                                                                         
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