For the University of Melbourne (UoM), providing a seamless experience to its 75,000 students, 40,000 staff and 385,000 alumni is of the utmost importance.
UoM is known as a leader in education and takes pride in also being a leader in innovation. Founded in 1853, it is considered the top university in Australia and ranked 32 in the world. The university continuously looks for ways to improve the delivery of world-class education and maintain its history of excellence.
UoM’s current goal is to build a digital campus to support 21st-century learning. As one of the key steps in this initiative, the university needs to migrate many of its older on-premise applications to modern cloud versions while continuing to support integrations across its growing mix of 700+ applications and data sources, including data pulled from the Internet of Things (IoT).
And as part of this effort, the university needed to free itself from its legacy integration approach, which segregated each application team to manage its own integrations, causing a tangle of “spaghetti” connections lacking a cohesive architecture across the company.
In 2018, the university selected the Boomi Platform to power its vision for a connected campus and support its diverse integration, data governance and API management needs.
Boomi helped UoM connect its applications and create a centralized data synchronization hub that provides granular visibility into data quality. With the Boomi Platform in place, the university was able to accelerate the rollout of new services to students across its seven campuses.
Choosing a Proven Provider for API Management
APIs are an important and growing facet of integration. Although choosing a platform that would allow seamless API-led connectivity was critical, UoM also wanted to ensure that it could address the diversity of integrations required by the university’s increasingly complex hybrid IT infrastructure.
With this in mind, UoM was looking for a platform that provided a practical balance of all these capabilities rather than searching for a mix of tools that addressed every possible theoretical requirement. It found that balance with Boomi.
UoM approached its digital modernization efforts by focusing first on using Boomi to eliminate data silos and then progressing towards unlocking data services as internal APIs for different domains in the organization.
Within a year, UoM’s integration team was orchestrating a huge volume of data and servicing as many as 5 million API calls a month on the Boomi Platform.
As part of the Boomi unified platform, Boomi API Management uses the same intuitive interface as Boomi Integration and Boomi DataHub. In combination, these cloud-native services build off each other to create a cohesive, connected technology fabric that is greater than the sum of its parts — and is the perfect platform to support a smart campus.
Empowering Students and Faculty Through Self-Service
As part of its overarching digital campus initiative, one of UoM’s goals is to provide self-service to all its operational groups, regardless of where they are. Critically, UoM wants to make it easy for departments and staff to quickly get access to the data that they need to manage current operations and gain insights for future improvements and innovations.
For example, the university has installed smart sensors in its buildings to better understand how to allocate classroom space and plan building maintenance tasks.
Boomi collects the data generated by these IoT sensors and transfers it to a data repository, along with information from other relevant applications. Students and faculty can access the data from the Boomi API Management Developer Portal. The portal provides an essential layer of self-service to reduce unnecessary support work for the IT team.
Contextualized Data, Powered by the Boomi Atom
The Boomi Atom architecture, along with all the capabilities in the Boomi Platform, has helped UoM along its path toward delivering a smart campus — or in the university’s case, seven smart campuses with centralized data.
Adoption of best-of-breed, cloud-based applications, including emerging technologies like the IoT and edge data, is simple with Boomi. Moreover, with the Boomi API Gateway, UoM can securely scale management of device data to provide easy access across the organization.
The real-time availability of critical business information provided by the Boomi Platform — including Boomi Integration, Boomi DataHub and Boomi API Management — is helping UoM contextualize data from its wide range of applications and devices.
Exposing data through APIs and managing the usage of those APIs will allow the university to offer that data as a service, fulfilling its goal of providing seamless experiences to its students, alumni and faculty.
Interested in learning more about how Boomi customers are innovating and transforming their organizations? Check out our customer stories.