Over the past decade, higher education has undergone significant change in which Logicalis has played a pivotal role around the world. Our front row seat has given us a perspective into the evolution of higher education, particularly as cloud technologies have been implemented and adopted.
Across the globe, educational organisations face even more challenges, especially in light of funding and budgets being cut. More than ever, institutions need to demonstrate resilience and innovation in an increasingly competitive environment.
To support this focus on innovation, IT solutions and services in the sector have had to undergo a significant transformation - not only to support the core activities of teaching and research, but also attract and drive student success and retention, improve outcomes of IT projects overall and increase research prestige.
Here are a few examples of how Logicalis’ specialist education teams have helped deliver tangible benefits. Crucial to all of these cases is the business collaboration with our clients: it means the foundations for future digital innovation are firmly laid for each organisation’s transformational change.
Creating a digital campus for the University of Wolverhampton, UK
The University, which has more than 23,000 students, 2,400 staff and four main campuses, was committed to improving the learning experience across all sites, transforming the way technology is used for learning, teaching and day-to-day business. Wolverhampton needed to create a platform that was available 24/7/365 for future digital innovation. Fiona Parsons, Director of Academic Support at UoW told us of her vision; ‘to create a digital campus of equal importance to our physical campus’.
Logicalis was selected to provide a Hybrid IT platform for UoW’s Digital Campus Programme. The specialist education team identified a range of potential providers, then followed the open Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) process for public sector tenders to evaluate the competing approaches. Hewlett Packard Enterprise and VMware technologies were selected to architect the platform which consisted of a five-layer Software Defined stack blending infrastructure, virtualisation, automation, cloud integration and instrumentation. Only with this Hybrid IT solution in place could the £30m Digital Campus Programme be implemented.
Since implementing the Logicalis solution, the University and 80% of students have reported an enhanced experience and already £33,000 in savings have been made by retiring unused applications and transitioning from legacy systems.
Providing a sustainable path for the fastest growing university in Middle Tennessee, USA
Logicalis has been the technology partner for Trevecca Nazarene University for more than 15 years. Whilst the University has grown dramatically, it had outgrown its antiquated IT storage network which was severely limiting the career-building prospects of its students.
Dr John Eberle, CIO at the University turned to Logicalis to help re-architect the storage and provide a sustainable path for university growth. ‘It’s a prime example of how Logicalis continually leverages its network and partnerships to enable us to focus less on our technology and more on what matters most: our students,” said Dr Eberle.
Refreshing a multi-campus network at Swinburne University, Australia
Logicalis was chosen by Swinburne to deploy one of the largest Internet Protocol (IP) networks in Australia.
Richard Constantine, CIO and IT Director, at Swinburne explained ‘each year we experience a high level of organic growth and were having to spend increasing amounts on upgrades to support this expansion. We needed a new infrastructure that would allow plenty of room for growth.” Improving the security position and the outdated phone infrastructure were key drivers for upgrades with the University looking for cost savings and improvement in service that an IP phone system could deliver.
Logicalis refreshed the network in a project worth more than $7 million and overhauled the communications infrastructure across six campuses in the state of Victoria, deploying more than 4,000 IP screen phones. It also implemented Cisco Security Agent, to mitigate against security risks. The refreshed infrastructure has delivered more than $900,000 in cost savings as well as a far more sophisticated communications platform.
Helping La Universidad Europea in Spain become a Data Driven University
A leading higher education centre in Spain, more than 16,000 students attend La Universidad Europea, which has several centres located in three Spanish cities. The big challenge was that data was housed in different applications and systems. These disparate system made it difficult to manage and exchange data between the different departments such as marketing, sales, finance, human resources, student and IT.
Logicalis provided a Platform-as a Service (PaaS) solution using IBM’s cloud data infrastructure which allowed the integration of different data and forms into a single instance and also simplified further analysis via the Business Intelligence Cognos Analytics solution.
As a result of deploying Logicalis’ solution the data from different departments are currently fully integrated and governed. The University now has the IT infrastructure and tools to collect vital information from quality data and can fine-tune strategic plans to suit their short, medium and long-term objectives.
Education sector revolution
These four examples of higher education institutions around the world go some way to illustrate the technological revolution that is taking place across the sector. There is much that other organisations can learn from how these
complex, often disparate organisations have harnessed the power of change to increase efficiency and impact. Logicalis is proud of these partnerships and looks forward to working with these and other higher education leaders in the future.