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One of the largest universities in the U.S. has moved its HR and financial systems to the cloud
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Texas A&M is using a combination of private cloud infrastructure and SaaS
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Deputy CIO Mark Schulz said addressing technical debt as part of the modernization process is key
Texas A&M University, one of the largest colleges in the U.S., pulled the plug on some of its legacy mainframe infrastructure, moving its financial and human resources (HR) workloads to the cloud. The transition was more than a decade in the making and is expected to save the institution $1.5 million each year. Deputy CIO Mark Schulz told Silverlinings those savings are hard won.
The plan to move to the cloud was first floated by Texas A&M’s Chancellor John Sharp in 2011, after consulting firm Deloitte recommended it make the switch. The University has been using mainframe infrastructure since the late 1950s.
Schulz said Texas A&M has taken a hybrid approach to the transition, leveraging Workday’s cloud-based software-as-a-service for its HR and payroll functions and private cloud infrastructure from Nutanix with Microsoft software for its financial systems.
According to Schulz, the move to Workday was a 2.5 to 3 year process, mostly because a lot a integration work was required. He explained the university had to ensure the software worked properly and accounted for all the school’s contracts, grants and “multitudes of cost centers.” He added Texas A&M brought “22 unique companies to the Workday implementation.”
“I think certainly when you’re dealing with legacy applications, there’s this huge set of business logic and business rules that’s baked into legacy applications,” he said. "It’s not always documented, it’s hard to uncover those, it’s hard to even know what they are."
Schulz continued: “With, for example, the Workday implementation, we had to find those and unwind those and change those and so we had a huge change impact to our stakeholders to implement Workday.”
The transition of its financial systems to a private cloud, meanwhile, involved a lot of like-for-like code translation, Schulz said. He likened the process to using Google Translate to rewrite the EBCDIC mainframe code for the cloud in ASCII. Schulz said the university teamed with Astadia to implement automated testing which was critical to the success of the process.
All told, the university spent about $22 million to replatform its financial system.
Why no public cloud?
You might be surprised by how much mainframe infrastructure is still out there. According to Rocket Software’s 2022 survey of 500 U.S. IT pros, 67% of Fortune 100 companies were still using mainframe tech and four out of five respondents said it was still critical to their operations. But slowly and surely, enterprises, government entities and educational institutions like Texas A&M are making the leap into the cloud.
Astute readers, however, may have noticed that Texas A&M isn’t really using the public cloud. Schulz said that’s both a return-on-investment decision as well as a security one. He clarified that on the latter front, its less a question of whether the cloud itself is secure and more one around whether its IT engineers have the appropriate experience to properly secure university assets in the cloud. For now, it’s just able to be more confident in a software-as-a-service provider who takes care of that.
That said, Schulz did note that Texas A&M is currently looking at where to store its business intelligence data for predictive reporting. Until now, it’s been easier to keep that on-premises, but it’s now examining the cloud as a serious option.
Words of wisdom
Schulz said leadership buy-in to the transition process was key, as was the ability to access appropriate funding to make the leap. He added the IT department didn’t shy away from answering tough questions from the university administration and faculty. That transparency helped the IT department bring the staff along for the ride as the migration moved forward.
Asked for the top tip he would give to any other entity attempting to transition away from mainframe infrastructure, Schulz said it’s key to honestly reckon with “technical debt.” The term refers to shortcuts an IT department may have taken in the past or other implementations which were done in a non-optimal way.
“Get your arms around what you have and what it does. And if you have technical debt, pay down your debt,” he concluded. “Those things – they don’t go away. We’ve brought a little bit of that with us, but we were able to take care of significant chunks along the way.”