State University of New York

Success Story

Largest university system in the U.S. uses Novell® exteNdTM to create Web services for its legacy mainframe administrative system

Overview

The State University of New York (SUNY) is the largest university system in the United States serving approximately 411,000 students. SUNY has 14,000 faculty members and 36,000 staff in 64 locations through the state.

Challenge

SUNY System Administration, based in Albany, runs a mainframe-based accounting system that manages all of the university's finance functions. Several SUNY campuses and institutions needed a way to electronically communicate with this home-grown application in order to develop more efficient local campus processes. For example, the University at Buffalo is working to replace a paper-based procurement process that can take up to five days. The ability to conduct electronic transactions with the SUNY system is critical, and would eliminate the need for two full-time people to re-key transactions.

SUNY wanted to build a Web-based system for electronic transactions that would be reusable for other finance, HR and inter-departmental transactions. SUNY also needed to communicate electronically outside of the university with a variety of state agencies.

Novell solution

"The entire Novell exteNd project came in as planned, on time and within budget. We're finding more and more cases where Novell can help us solve business problems and find ourselves saying, 'Wow, Novell can do that?'"

David Powalyk
CTO
State University of New York
System Administration

After completing a requirements assessment and design review, SUNY determined that the only way to get the Web functionality it wanted was to build a custom application. The university had begun plans to do so before discovering Novell® exteNdTM.

"The Novell exteNd team came in about 8 a.m. one morning and had an actual proof of concept model to show us by 10 a.m.," said David Powalyk, CTO of State University of New York System Administration. "We had a list of specific objectives we wanted to accomplish and were particularly concerned that the solution be scalable, stable and secure. The Novell team quickly met each objective on the list and put the solution in place."

Working with Novell Consulting®, the University at Buffalo used Novell exteNd to create a Web-based application to replace its mainframe data entry process, converting data into XML to seamlessly communicate with the university's mainframe system. The XML interface will enable the university to significantly reduce the time required to process a procurement request once the Web-based procurement process is put in place. Staff members will no longer have to re-type information, which significantly reduces manual error and administrative costs.

"Not only will we reduce the amount of paperwork associated with procurement requests, but we'll also free up our staff so they can spend more time supporting our faculty and staff," said Joe Kerr, Assistant Vice President of Technology Services at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. "A more timely procurement process helps us better manage our overall local university system."

By relying on Novell exteNd, SUNY reduced not only the time to get a new application in place, but also the risk involved with developing a custom solution. In addition, the core functionality of Novell exteNd enables the IT staff to focus on what it does best, such as the user interface, rather than worry about back-end application integration.

"The big success for us is that we put a Web front-end on a mainframe accounting application and can now process transactions electronically," said Kerr. "Now we can do the same for a variety of legacy systems. Novell exteNd has a good hub and spoke concept which makes it easy for us to continually adapt the application without the need for programming expertise."

Moving forward, SUNY is implementing Novell exteNd at additional campuses and creating Web services for other legacy applications to automate communication and transactions with external agencies as well.

"The entire Novell exteNd project came in as planned, on time and within budget," said Powalyk. "We're finding more and more cases where Novell can help us solve business problems and find ourselves saying, 'Wow, Novell can do that?'"

Results

With a new Web-based application based on Novell exteNd, SUNY can accept procurement requests electronically, more efficiently, and with greater accuracy. Electronic transactions free up a two-person staff to spend more time solving faculty and staff issues and less time manually re-typing and reconciling data.

Novell exteNd significantly reduced the risk of building a custom application and allows the IT staff to concentrate on its core strengths. SUNY now has a scalable solution to create Web services for other legacy systems to automate financial and HR processes across the university system.

"By finding the right software in Novell exteNd, we didn't have to write something from scratch and then worry about maintaining it," said Kerr. "We are moving to a world of Web services where everything is reusable. Novell exteNd is a key part of our evolutionary approach and how we want to do business in the future."