Case Study

Making the Faculty and Academia Even Smarter at Boston University

SnapLogic’s self-service integration platform automates admissions processes and solves identity authentication challenge

Boston University Backstory

Founded in 1839, Boston University is one of the largest private universities in the United States. The university is also one of the largest private employers in Boston and has over 34,000 students.

The Challenge

As a leader in academia, Boston University (BU) strives to provide an outstanding student experience in all aspects of students’ interactions with the university. Unfortunately, challenges with the university’s data architecture presented hurdles to students, faculty, and professional staff moving seamlessly from one system to another. The university relied heavily on the IT department to connect systems and automate processes like research operations, class scheduling, financial processes, building access, and others.

In the admissions area, some processes relied on older technologies that were labor intensive for staff to maintain. In research, the faculty needed a more seamless connection between training systems and research compliance tracking.

One of the main problems with the university’s data architecture lay in its approach to data integration. IT used a mix of homegrown ETL tools built out of Java and Pearl as well as a legacy data integration tool. They also created elaborate workarounds on the mainframes to complete integration tasks. These approaches required continuous manual support and maintenance. Despite having ETL and data integration tools, IT had to submit support tickets to their data integration vendor and manually write/rewrite code to fulfill integration requests whenever the data source code had to be changed.

“We wrote code whenever there was a need to connect two or more applications or move files from one database to another,” said Carmine A. Granucci, Assistant Director, Integration at Boston University. “We’d have a multistep process, and sometimes the data would appear empty or incomplete.”

The Solution

Granucci and his team began evaluating different approaches to building integrations, migrating data to new cloud applications, and retiring legacy systems. Granucci wanted a standard integration approach for the university with the help of an integration platform as a service (iPaaS). His goal was to select an iPaaS that did not require hiring additional employees. The team needed to connect dozens of applications and systems and leverage cloud services like Amazon S3 and Aurora to facilitate the transformation and movement of data.

“We selected SnapLogic as our iPaaS because it enabled us to build codeless integrations and automate processes twice as fast as before by simply dragging and dropping Snaps together,” said Granucci. “We are now able to build and execute an integration within minutes.”

Once SnapLogic was deployed, IT was able to support the implementation of a new student recruitment and admissions system that is easier for staff to use and provides a more customized experience to applicants. When a prospective student submits an application, the student information system automatically generates a new record for each application in Salesforce.com, the university’s internal applications portal.

Granucci’s team also helped the research and operations departments with identity management. By using the SnapLogic LDAP Snap and exposing REST API calls, IT automated the process of giving authorized students, faculty, and staff access to secure information systems, facilities, and research laboratories. Also, IT helped the university’s Animal Science Center to grant authorized people access to its training and procedures.

Business Outcomes

Boston University now has a single source of truth with the SnapLogic Intelligent Integration Platform. As a result, BU Information Systems & Technology has improved services to students, faculty, and staff. With SnapLogic as the integration standard, the IT team has provided rapid integration support to the multiple departments and campus organizations. “SnapLogic has helped us become the relationship builders between groups on campus where we are a trusted party,” said Granucci. “We are pushing the limits with SnapLogic to help Boston University make an impact in the lives of its students and in the community.”