UXC subsidiary helps UTS student reporting with IBM software

Integrator and wholly-owned UXC subsidiary, UXC Performance Management (UXCPM), is expecting its latest deployment with the University of Technology Sydney to open up new solution opportunities.

The company has just completed an IBM software deployment project at UTS. It worked with the university for a number of years supplying Cognos, the vendor’s business intelligence range, to various departments.

The integrator secured the latest project to rollout Cognos 8.3 as UTS’ new student management reporting tool through a tender process. The software will supplant the previous Business Objects solution from software vendor, SAP.

“We had skills in both Business Objects and Cognos products so it played a part in our tender response,” UXCPM business development manager, Neil Currie, said. “We took a team of our people and put them in UTS alongside the university’s staff to work out and understand what was involved in changing the system.”

Since IBM Cognos Guardian services had previously done a proof of concept, UXCPM approached the group for quality assurance.

Working with UTS’s internal IT team, the implementation began in November last year and required taking every Business Objective reports and rewriting them in the new Cognos platform.

Cross-checking was also done to verify the results as well as performance testing to ensure the product could cope with data volumes generated by the university’s 33,000 students. The system went live this month.

Maintenance is supported by UTS’ in-house IT department with the integrator as a third-party advisor.

Sitting at more than $500,000, the project was significant in expanding UXCPM’s relationship with UTS, Currie said. The company has already been called on for additional projects for the university, one of which is to provide quality assurance and modelling expertise for a data warehouse.

The integrator also works with numerous educational institutes including University of Western Sydney (UWS), University of Wollongong and University of Queensland.