Case Study

How Skidmore College Fast-Tracked Their Oracle Cloud Migration With SnapLogic

Backstory

Skidmore College is one of the top 4-year private liberal arts colleges in America. They have over 2,700 undergraduate students who engage in 44 majors, 19 varsity athletics teams and over 100 student clubs.

Technical leadership at the institution wanted to modernize their legacy on-premises systems and move to the Oracle Cloud. This would be a massive undertaking for a small team led by Paul Coleman (Asst Dir of Architecture and Integration, Enterprise Systems) and Tony Kowalick (Asst Dir of Application Development, Enterprise Systems).

The Challenge

Skidmore College had relied on aging servers and software housed on-premises to power its most essential systems. The infrastructure was costly and cumbersome to maintain. Many of their legacy systems had integrations that were difficult to use, didn’t have proper documentation (i.e. hard to troubleshoot and fix), and would require expertise that no longer existed in order to modernize.

Skidmore was using a homegrown identity provider solution that required manual maintenance and expertise. They needed to integrate student admissions, enrollment, payment data, and their access control system, to provide a seamless experience for both staff and students.

Seeing an opportunity for improvement, the administration launched an ambitious digitization initiative to move to the Oracle Cloud. Their major challenge was finding a solution that would efficiently migrate data and integrate their different services to the Oracle Cloud without a large IT team. They needed an iPaaS solution that was easy to use, scalable, and had pre-built connectors to the Oracle Cloud.

In addition, Skidmore has a custom-built, on-premise database named IDM that functions as a profile management system between their primary systems of record and downstream systems.

With this IDM database comes the challenge of connecting two systems of record from Oracle HCM and Banner, creating a need to negotiate which system took precedence depending on an individual’s role at the school. Skidmore College needed an integration tool that would be at the heart of all transaction processing and the intelligent negotiation of which system of record to use.

The Solution

Skidmore College chose SnapLogic’s Intelligent Integration Platform. It was the solution that was the best of both worlds, it was easy to use yet powerful enough to enable complex integrations with Oracle Cloud. SnapLogic was also key to connecting all the systems of record and downstream systems to Skidmore’s on-premise custom IDM database.

Instead of manual data entry and processing, the platform automatically extracted, transformed, and loaded data from various sources. This automation accelerated the generation of information, ensuring real-time availability and reducing manual errors.

The following are examples of processes and pipelines that Skidmore College uses:

Student enrollment

A student gets uploaded to Slate (student admissions platform), and when the student pays a deposit on their tuition, the information automatically gets transferred to Banner (higher-ed ERP system) via REST snap and a student ID is created. The student then uses that ID on a web portal to create their Okta (IDP) account via REST Snap. All this student data is automatically integrated using SnapLogic. This allows for a single source of truth when it comes to student data and is crucial to ensuring a smooth student experience at Skidmore.

Oracle Cloud migration

The Oracle Snap pack was used to migrate on-premise to Oracle Cloud. Snaps such as Oracle-Execute and Oracle-Insert are just some examples of connectors used for this cloud migration project. Using these Oracle-specific Snaps provides reusability and easy maintenance of pipelines.

By migrating to the cloud and aggregating data from various sources, decision-makers could oversee enrollment, payments and IDs, and improve operations. Additionally, Skidmore College was able to reduce instances of manual data handling and errors to ensure accuracy and consistency across all student information systems.

Business Results

Addressed resource constraints

By implementing SnapLogic, Skidmore College showed its determination to overcome challenges and drive change despite staffing constraints. This exemplified its commitment to finding innovative solutions to achieve legacy migration goals.

Embraced cloud transformation

The college’s decision to migrate from its on-premise infrastructure to Oracle Cloud signified its embrace of cloud technologies and modernization strategy. This change reflected its forward-thinking approach and willingness to leverage scalability, flexibility and cost-efficiency of the cloud.

Streamlined student management processes

Skidmore College’s focus on integrating data for student admissions, enrollment, tuition payments and IDs highlighted its commitment to streamlining critical student processes. By centralizing this data using SnapLogic, it aimed to improve efficiency, enhance accuracy and provide seamless experiences.

Leveraged innovative technology

Skidmore College’s adoption of SnapLogic demonstrated the college’s embrace of innovative technology to optimize operations. Leveraging a low-code integration platform allowed them to simplify complex data tasks, automate workflows, and foster cross-departmental collaboration.

Future Use Cases

Skidmore College is developing plans to update and migrate alumni data from their current CRM to Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge, a CRM specific to non-profit organizations, for a better customer experience.