In the higher education sector, Oracle has not always made the attention-grabbing moves like competitors IBM or SAS. But the trio of releases Tuesday follows others in the last month on related to investment and implementation related to its analytics and hardware offerings at the University of Louisville and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. University business intelligence and analytics leaders have said that an increasing amount of large and mid-range vendors have taken to implementations, donations and training for the next generation of information managers.
Included Oracle’s announcements Tuesday:
The University of Minnesota compressed more 200 Oracle database instances into less than 20 by hosting its IT environment on two Oracle Exadata Database Machine half racks, effectively cutting its data center floors space and TCO. University enterprise architecture Senior Director Patton Fast said in a release that, with infrastructure “dramatically” reduced from the consolidated databases, DBAs at the university have been able to drive better adoption of new applications and best practices within the last nine months.
The University of Akron deployed Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition and Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise Performance Management in the vendor’s Cloud Solutions for Education and Research. While not a new Oracle customer, the Akron, Ohio-based university sought these new deployments as a way to address limited data center space for staff seeking ad hoc queries and analysis on personalized dashboards.
East-West University in Chicago implemented Oracle’s PeopleSoft Campus Solutions applications to add-on administrative automation and integration on student and alumni activity for the school’s legacy systems. With 800 students, the small university was able to nab a federal grant to supplant costs of the applications and work out a pricing model based on student head count, according to Oracle.
Oracle’s announcements also had another competitive angle, as rival HCM provider Workday held its annual user conference, which included its own higher education announcements.
Justin Kern is senior editor at Information Management and can be reached at justin.kern@sourcemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter at @IMJustinKern.
