Fulfilling Integration Aspirations at the University of Exeter

Integrating 50 software applications in just three months - this is the feat Chakray Consulting UK achieved for the University of Exeter using WSO2’s integration capabilities. A part of the Russell Group, the University of Exeter is renowned for its research-intensive agenda. As with any world-class educational institution, the University of Exeter seeks to build winning partnerships with its diverse student base and employees, create an impact with their research and ensure their strategies are future-oriented. Their digital strategy falls within this framework and a university of this scale (over 20,000 students, approximately 4,000 employees and campuses located in multiple locations) has several different systems in operation.

“Integration is strategic, it is always long term,” explains Jack A. Rider, CTO of Chakray Consulting. Accordingly, the university wanted to discard their legacy systems and adopt a cloud framework and service-oriented architecture. The beginning was quite daunting - as there were over 50 third party applications to contend with, and much of the time was spent on meetings alone (around 1,500 hours as shown by a rough calculation). Yet, the project was made easier because the university’s enterprise architects had a precise idea of the architecture they aspired to. Furthermore, Chakray Consulting has developed a solutions accelerator to build WSO2 platforms from code. As the name suggests, it expedites this process.

Selecting a cloud provider raised some issues as well initially - the Zero solution enabled them to create this on-site, Chakray then used AWS, switched to Microsoft Azure and reverted to AWS (without causing any significant changes to the project timelines). The current architecture uses a range of systems - SQL Server, Oracle Database, Git repository, and Amazon Aurora to name a few. WSO2’s integration platform was used as the modular design, was absolutely necessary for integration of this scale, engages with continuous integration and automation technologies to enable the Zero solution, and could be used for hybrid and cloud deployments.

Now that the integration has proved successful, Jack is especially thankful for the encouraging leadership extended by the University which, in his opinion, is one of the lesser mentioned aspects of large-scale projects.

Watch Chakray’s presentation for more details of their integration feat.

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