SIGMA SaaS in Higher Education

Traditionally we have focused on the development and distribution of software for our clients that were installed each on their own and each in their own systems, which means that in the 90s we had to compile the software for different platforms from several vendors such as SUN, HP or DEC.

After some time of awareness and decision making, all customers unified their platforms to work with Sun Solaris and all applications were migrated to Java, so we achieved a significant milestone, we optimized the software engineering and development process, returning a cost reduction by minimizing points of failure because of the platforms unification.

That led to a period of technical stability in which we focused developing new framework capabilities and new suite modules, but still oriented to a on-premise architecture based on a UNIX Sun Solaris and Java environment for fully web multi tier applications.

The European and global context since 2008 was that of a deep economic crisis. We met in 2012 in a situation in which that crisis affected all areas, particularly in the public sector and the university environment, both in teaching and research.

SIGMA suites VEGA Student Information System (SIS VEGA) and ARGOS Research Information System (CRIS ARGOS), are designed with a very wide functional coverage to meet the needs of large universities, plus a huge capacity parameterization to fit different needs. However, the market for large Spanish public universities was in a situation that did not offer many opportunities to apply.

SIGMA then raised the need to offer its products at higher education institutions of smaller size, both public and private, that due to its human and economic capacity, in principle they could not cope with the demands and costs that the powerful SIGMA suites required.

SIGMA addressed relatively small private colleges but of great reputation and large centres attached to public universities. All of them, on budget and human resources, not eligible for a suite like SIS VEGA but yet with a SaaS solution could become part of the community of users of SIGMA.

From the customer's point of view the SaaS model directly had a number of advantages:

• Less or no initial investment and therefore less risk.
• Reduced costs, because when paid for the use they avoided costs of hardware and software licenses.
• Immediate updates and new features. Not only the customer does not require dedicated staff to updates, but the available software updates immediately.
• Support more agile and fast. The application bugs have a direct treatment and the solution was put into service more quickly than in in-house facilities.
• The client could focus their efforts on the core business. Systems are really outsourced to the point of not devote efforts to their selection or maintenance.
• Increased availability and data security, having infrastructure that, despite being shared, is more powerful and secure.

Figure 3. SaaS Customer Benefits


Source: SIGMA

The SIGMA approach for the new clients required a review of the organization of the software offered to universities, so as to define lighter suites to be used by higher education colleges and centres, more process-oriented and focused on the end user, who would have also a more specialized and nearer support from SIGMA. It also involved a review of the concept of implementation, running as a process to look out of the box both software and master data essential to start using the system.

The first approach was to have a SaaS environment for each client, a similar model to the traditional ASP. That approach did not provide the return required for the cost incurred in the administration of different environments. With this approach we only outsourced service, a SaaS solution was offered, but not at low cost.

But the essential requirement to provide a platform for Students Information System in Software as a Service and at low cost was to implement a platform shared by multiple clients (multi-tenant), so as to share infrastructure costs, but also that they could share the same software in a single environment to reduce administration costs. That premise required the adaptation of the SIGMA framework that would provide multi-client capabilities to SIS VEGA and CRIS ARGOS suites.

All SIGMA software is based on FS3 Framework SIGMA 3. FS3 is the SIGMA last generation homemade framework based on the latest open J2EE standards and the result of our experience over 15 years in the ICT sector for higher education. Adapting the framework was not a very expensive operation because of its design and it didn't require any special awareness of the development teams, as they worked still considering a single customer but developing software with new adaptive characteristics.

SIGMA focused efforts on having an environment with totally customizable resources for application and data layers, and able to be configured for each client. This was essential since each centre could have different requirements for its needs of process capacity, space and bandwidth, not just because of the size of the institution but also according to the services used by its community.

That both were the main tasks being faced during 2012 to allow SIGMA to launch a low cost SaaS solution for its customers.

As a result, application management was much improved as SaaS implies a 24x7 service availability and therefore maintenance time had to be minimized. Although the system reboots could be mitigated by load balancing techniques, some software design solutions were adopted to optimize the maintenance time. The use and release of memory was improved, hot-applied parameter changes were introduced, and Java packages were reorganized in order to minimize memory consumption…

Figure 4. SIGMA SaaS Multi-tenant architecture


Source: SIGMA

With all these changes to the framework, a suitable platform had to be defined to exploit our SIS VEGA suite in a SaaS model, for which we set up several business and service premises:

• Reducing costs compared to traditional client platforms
• Minimizing maintenance and administration costs
• Maintaining or increasing the service level agreements to access the platform

With these principles in mind and considering the market niche that we focused, in addition to attracting new customers, multi-client SIS VEGA in SaaS could also improve the situation of current customers with a profile that could fit into this service.

The service improvement focused on the fact that these colleges and centres lacked the technical human resources necessary to manage a software suite sized as SIS VEGA, or if they did, the time investment they had to make to only manage the platform made them almost impractical to devote time to other tasks, perhaps more important, in its infrastructure.

And so happened with the customer dedicated staff to use the system, the end users, who usually were working with simpler systems but much less complete. Those users required extra support and a review of the functionality offered that focused on the basic needs of the entity. With this additional support, the improvements offered by SIGMA solutions outweighed the tasks that previously had to be done manually by not having a suitable tool.

There is not only a saving of dedicated internal resources, but also in the acquisition cost of hardware, software, licenses, maintenance and management of these licenses. The cost of a standard infrastructure for a small centre who wants to run the solution in house may be around 30,000 € and 40,000 € , so even counting that human resources are available to manage the platform, avoiding that initial investment is in many cases crucial, as it acts as a barrier to entry. In that way SIGMA service becomes a "pay per use" that requires no initial investment.

To reduce costs in the SaaS platform regarding those we could find in our traditional customers platforms went through using a proven high performance hardware at low cost and consolidating servers using free and open operating systems and open source software in different layers of the architecture, counting on a very powerful open source community that allowed us to offer this service with all the guarantees of quality.

One of the clients using the suite SIS VEGA on-premise was the IQS (Institut Químic de Sarrià). IQS is a university centre of international prestige, with 107 years of teaching experience, is an institution in the Spanish academic community and one of the leading schools in the country.

Since joining the University Ramon Llull in 1990, as a founding member, IQS has undergone a major transformation: from being a centre around chemistry knowledge today consists of IQS School of Engineering both Industrial and Chemical, and IQS School of Management and Business Administration.

The main effort of this institution focuses on teaching and research, so that the academic management software should be a means to facilitate their work. This was understood by the institution managers, who decided to migrate their traditional in house service to the SaaS model offered by SIGMA.

The decision to migrate to this new platform was taken from the centre's executive direction, as discussed in the Gartner research note Survey Analysis: Buyers Tell Us About SaaS and Cloud Adoption Through 2014, it follows the patterns of adoption of SaaS. In Europe these types of decisions are often taken from executive management positions and are not typically involving operating staff. In fact, the rest of customers who have joined the service the behaviour has been the same, although the case mix was different because IQS was migrating an already established platform for SIS VEGA on premise to the SaaS platform, and in the case of new customers they were purchasing the SIS VEGA directly on SaaS.

Dr. Pere Regull Climent, IQS CEO explains the motivations for migrating the platform and the experience of using this service:

"What advantages have you found in the Software as a Service model that SIGMA has provided you for the Students Information System platform?

In IQS decided to adopt the Software as a Service model for greater independence of the previous management, which had some easements that wanted to improve.

This platform has allowed us to gain confidence in using the system and reduce the resources that were previously devoted, both human and financial, to the maintenance of our own equipment and platforms.

This has been the driving force that has led us to the decision to change and adopt the new service offered by SIGMA.

How did the community perceive change? Has been transparent? Have you had any impact?

To the community has maintained the level of service at all times and has been perfectly transparent. In the comments, both teachers and students to interact with the platform, there has been no complaint at any time, but quite the opposite. The remote access from outside IQS facilities today are faster and more agile, and most importantly, the level of service has been maintained at all times so that no one has been affected by the change.

Are you raising some future services to incorporate this model of Software as a Service?

We are currently evaluating possibilities especially for studies applying online and eLearning, and we are also seeing increased use by all that is mobile apps and smartphones.

We have not made specific decisions but we believe that with this service together with the platform we can provide efficient access to all these technologies that will become increasingly essential in the teaching methodology of a university like ours."

Gartner's report shows that the SaaS migration in Europe is at a good pace, although, in the education sector this growth is a bit more content. It seems that the current economic situation in Europe will push the sector to adopt further SaaS model as the economic benefits are clear.

Since early 2012 the service provided by SIGMA has gone through several phases during which it has matured both the solution core and the service delivery, so that it can address the large universities market.

Until now, our clients in that market use the SIGMA solutions in house, however they hire some SIGMA technical services as middleware installation and configuration or performance tests.

SIGMA is now offering its software suites in a complete SaaS model to some medium-big universities, based on the same business and service premises as described above. Likewise, the integration of new services in the SaaS model, such as Business Intelligence, eLearning or mobile apps, allows the SIGMA SaaS clients to enter in a continuous integration model in which using those new services is an easy to adopt operation.

That opportunities with medium-big institutions furthermore the assimilation of several small centres attached to large universities is consolidating the service model in 2013 and expecting to grow in 2014.

The Gartner research note Survey Analysis: Buyers Tell Us About SaaS and Cloud Adoption Through 2014 notes that the adoption of PaaS technology will be a requirement for all providers who want to offer a quality service with guaranteed success:

"PaaS Capability Continues to Influence SaaS Selection Criteria

To gauge the growing interest in PaaS, we asked respondents to indicate the importance of the vendor's ability to provide PaaS capability when selecting a SaaS provider. Worldwide results are shown in Figure 4. More than 96% of respondents indicated that PaaS capabilities are a requirement when their organizations selected SaaS providers."

So, the near future of the SIGMA SaaS is through moving to a private cloud for SIS VEGA. Currently there are several open source solutions for cloud management that will allow SIGMA to reach that goal. Then it will be possible to easily manage all hardware resources to extract the maximum potential and to get a greater return on the investment done. Using this cloud for SIS VEGA will be a lower cost operation for the customers.

José Luis Poy, CTO

José Luis Poy, CTO Chief Technology & Innovation Officer, his main current activity is related to innovation and technology, with special interest areas as Mobile Apps, BI platforms, eLearning platforms and Cloud services. He is a member of RS3G, group in which works to facilitate the European student Mobility, and he is also a member of EuroCRIS, organization in which deals with Research Information Systems standards.

Credits: Juan José Fuentes, Middleware & Systems Manager
Jordi Cuní, Software Architecture Manager