University of Illinois taps online apps to integrate systems and data

By EI staff | Dec 18, 2008

Thumbnail: 

The University of Illinois is working with Progress Software to enable the university to deploy new online applications and to support the University's virtual campus for distance learning. The University of Illinois is using Progress® SonicMQ® to ensure accurate, timely delivery of enterprise data to cross-departmental applications while improving the integration with its Banner ERP system. As a result, the university will be able to increase control over the flow of sensitive student and employee data, decouple existing applications to improve overall efficiency, and increase IT flexibility to better align with business needs.

"More than 69,000 students and 24,000 employees use our three-campus university system, which is located in Urbana-Champaign, Chicago and Springfield. Connecting all of their disparate systems and harnessing the flow of information among them has been a massive undertaking made easier with SonicMQ," said Amin Kassem, manager, Administrative Information Technology Services, University of Illinois. "We chose SonicMQ because of its ability to handle the requirements that go with such an enormous enterprise messaging initiative. We now have a consistent and reliable messaging architecture that ensures all enterprise information will fall into the correct place for all our student-facing applications, such as the Global Campus and online enrollment system and our back-end employee applications."

The University of Illinois recently completed a five-year, $200 million ERP implementation, affecting applications across a number of departments, including student enrollment and records, human resources, finance, financial aid and accounts receivable. The deployment impacts approximately 130 enterprise-wide systems along with thousands of departmental systems. The university needed a solution to secure and log the delivery of enterprise data in a decentralized environment, producing reusable objects that could reduce integration and development time while allowing the administration and staff to maintain consistency across the enterprise.

The SonicMQ was selected because of its ability to quickly and accurately distribute large volumes of enterprise data to applications across the impacted departments, while reducing point-to-point integration with the new ERP system. With SonicMQ, university users are now able to more effectively leverage the Banner ERP system to better service business needs in a timely manner. As a result, the university is already seeing a return on its investment across its departments, ranging from 15 percent annual savings from a revamped procurement process to the streamlining of the document imaging process for student services within financial aid and recruiting/admissions departments.

"A strong, distributed messaging backbone is a critical component for any organization looking to enable online applications across disparate organizations or departments," said Hub Vandervoort, CTO, SOA Infrastructure products, Progress Software. "Using SonicMQ, the University of Illinois ensures vital communication between distributed applications to create a better learning experience for online students, a more user-friendly experience for students using critical online applications and a more productive user experience for university employees."