It was not that long ago that students stood in long lines in university gymnasiums in an experience called "rush," registering for each of their classes one long line at a time. At the end of the day, manually generated lists were keyed into early mainframe computers, generating primitive computer printout class lists for faculty. Today, students register for all their classes at the same time, on-line, from any browser, anywhere in the world. A lot has changed between then and now.

For many institutions of higher education, 1999 was a transitional year in Information Technology (IT). Faced with the uncertainty of Y2K, many chose to abandon their often home-grown back office student information systems (SIS) and embark in a new direction of student-facing Web-based services, often built on top of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platforms from vendors like Oracle, PeopleSoft, SCT, Datatel or SAP. Institutions invested millions in implementing the first wave of these systems. Today, forward-thinking institutions, such as Michigan's Wayne State, are implementing the next wave.

Client-centric Approach

The Web services world is migrating from a bottoms-up integration model to a top-down service integration model that leverages multiple underlying enterprise application components. Instead of taking a process-oriented approach, like student registration, and making the process more efficient and productive for the university, the new wave adopts a client-centric model, driven by understanding what students, faculty and administrators really want when registering for classes.

For example, while a Web-based registration system makes a student and administration's life easier, what a faculty member would really be satisfied with is the registration list, integrated with the student's picture from one database and the student's transcript, to assure that prerequisites have been met, from an entirely different system. Understanding application linkages from a user's perspective often yields very different architectural approaches.

Increasingly, most students and faculty are demanding always-on services, with single sign-on, tighter security, and easier use. At the same time, IT organizations are deploying new software to enable service provisioning, building robust identity management systems, and deploying compelling portals in an attempt to meet these expectations. Many Chief Information Officers (CIOs), finding that the increasing complexity of integrating and managing applications is taxing both their people and their budgetary resources, are looking for a simpler way, with less risk and worry.

Services Oriented Architecture

Sun Microsystems already assists many CIOs and IT organizations in managing complexity successfully, taking mission-critical administrative applications, such as ERP/SIS systems, and converting them to a services-oriented architecture (SOA). The days in academia when email systems went down for several hours, with little notice or impact, are a distant memory. Today, messaging systems that are always on and always backed up, is a non-negotiable requirement from campus users.

Critical to a top-down service integration model that leverages multiple underlying enterprise application components is a stable, tightly integrated middleware stack. Sun's Java Enterprise System (Java ES) is an example of such a stack, providing functionality such as Messaging, Web, Portal, Calendaring, and Directory Servers that benefit the CIO by enhancing client experiences and satisfaction with first-generation Web-based campus services. Sun's Calendaring Server has proved particularly popular in higher education as an enhancement to existing email and class scheduling systems.

A stable, reliable, and secure, operating system is also a necessity in the always-on world of SOA. Solaris 10 OS, with advanced new security features and predictive self-healing also introduces innovative new capabilities like DTrace, a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework for tuning applications and troubleshooting systemic problems in real time which can be used by IT personnel to spot and remove bottlenecks that may be inhibiting ERP/SIS system performance.

Sun can also help CIOs do more with less by providing several choices in processors (UltraSPARC, x86, and AMD technology) and operating systems (Solaris, Solaris x86, and Linux software). Sun's new 64-bit AMD Opteron-based platforms, which provide maximum price performance, are proving popular with institutions faced with rapidly scaling services due to increased client demand.

Sun works with all the leading ERP providers to optimize their products on Sun platforms, from design engineering through performance tuning. Currently, Sun is developing connectors to seamlessly link these products with Sun's new identity management products based on the Waveset acquisition.

Sun also has a number of Centers of Excellence (COE) in Administrative Computing, campuses around the world who work specifically with one of the ERP/SIS partners to help other customers in their implementation or management of the systems. In addition to the dozens of reference customers Sun has for each of the ERP/SIS partners, all these schools have made or begun the transition to the next wave, using a variety of Sun products and services, and are willing to assist other institutions in evolving to a tops-down SOA approach.

Case Study: The University of Utah — Sun/PeopleSoft Center of Excellence

The University of Utah has standardized on Sun servers and storage and PeopleSoft applications for its business and student administration-computing infrastructure. Sun servers range from Netra T1 servers to a 24 CPU Sun Fire 6900 server, with a total of 40 terabytes of Sun StorEdge disk arrays. The University's PeopleSoft on Sun solution consistently delivers the performance, availability and flexibility required to support over 45,000 users. As a result of the school's demonstrated expertise in applying these products, Sun and PeopleSoft have created the Sun-PeopleSoft Center of Excellence at the University of Utah, under which the school shares its vision with both companies and with other educational institutions that wish to achieve similar success.

Case Study: Wayne State University — Sun/SCT Center of Excellence

Wayne State University, Michigan's only urban research university, has built an integrated campus infrastructure with Sun technologies, delivering services on demand to 32,000 students enrolled in more than 350 major subject areas in 14 schools and colleges. Wayne State integrated disparate applications from Student Systems (SCT Banner), eLearning (Blackboard), mail (Mirapoint), and others, into a seamless bundle of services using Sun technology. Wayne State's IT infrastructure is based upon a robust Java environment, Solaris OS, and a variety of mid to high end servers and storage equipment from Sun.

Wayne State University has made a successful transition into the next wave by deploying Java ES to provide seamless integration of Web-based services to the entire campus community, and in doing so has improved client satisfaction and responsiveness while reducing costs, removing complexity, shorting service development times, and resting easier with a more stable, reliable infrastructure supporting their mission-critical applications. "To succeed in the future, universities will have to provide individuals with convenient, personalized, self-service access to information and services, said John Camp, Associate Vice President of Wayne State University. "The foundation for delivering these services is an absolutely reliable computing and networking infrastructure, period."

Higher education CIOs can accelerate their evolution to a SOA by establishing a partnership with Sun to assess their current situation, recommend the optimum project priority and timetable, and begin transferring knowledge to client personnel, using every device from education and training to co-hosted Managed Services to maintain high-level service performance and client satisfaction while employees come up to speed with SOA.

For more information on Sun's Administrative Computing solutions please visit http://www.sun.com/edu/commofinterest/admin/, click here to have your local Sun representative contact you or email education_news@sun.com