Reaping the Rewards of Disruption
In Partnership With:
IT in the service of HE
Federation University Australia is punching well above its weight: The regional University is delivering a model of learning that’s replicable internationally, thanks to some very smart thinking on the part of its ITS team
E Andrew Tully Executive Director of ITS and Business Solutions (CIO)
With over 20 years of leadership experience in a variety of Board, C level and Senior Management roles, Andrew has the ability to successfully transform under performing and sub optimised IS operating environments within a vast array of organisations ranging from large multinationals to ISP IPO start-ups and SME organisations. His engaging & empowering leadership style has been the key to uplift organisations into functionally efficient, streamlined operating units. He’s currently CIO at Federation University. Preceding this, he oversaw the IT Operations nationally with an annual MOP budget in excess of $35m for the Australian Red Cross Blood Service. His strong bias towards good practice frameworks like Prince2, MSP / P3O for Portfolio, Program & Project Management, TOGAF for Enterprise Architecture, ITIL for Service Management & ISO 27001/2 for IT Security assists him in providing form and structure across immature environments.
very business has been disrupted by technology, and the higher education sector is no exception. Even at long established universities, the days when students were content to devote three or four years of their lives and engage in a highly limited number of courses, mainly unrelated to real world issues and employer expectations, are firmly in the past. In any case the sheer numbers of students aspiring to higher education and degree level technical programmes have stressed the old model to breaking point. Federation University Australia (universally known as FedUni) traces its origins back to the former Ballarat School of Mines, founded in 1870 and later transformed into the University of Ballarat. In 2014 the University amalgamated with the Gippsland Campus of Monash University, and FedUni was born. It is one of a small group of universities in Australia that embrace both traditional higher education and the more directly vocational TAFE (Technical And Further Education) strata of education. It was constituted as predominantly
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“Our vision was to transform a local university into a global operator in a context of an ever evolving sector whilst taking advantage of the benefits and opportunities digital disruption offers” – Andrew Tully, Executive Director of ITS and Business Solutions (CIO) a regional institution serving Victoria, the most densely populated state in Australia, but there has also been growth in its international footprint
with a new support centre in Malaysia and partner institutes in other parts of the Asia Pacific region including the likes of Hong Kong and Beijing.
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Accenture serves up the cloud on client terms Objective Serve and grow its clientele with solutions that address evolving IT trends and the desire for new business models
The HPE Helion private cloud provides the right foundation for Accenture’s innovative hybrid solutions
Approach Leverage the HPE Helion private cloud and HPE Flexible Capacity to build and deliver hybrid cloud solutions that follow the public cloud consumption model IT Matters • Optimized client solutions using HPE’s powerful private cloud hardware ooering • Leveraged HPE’s Operations Orchestration software to drive automation within its diierent client ooerings and capabilities • Enabled clients to access technology without a large capital outlay using HPE Flexible Capacity Business Matters • Delivered bundled solutions more in line with client and industry trends • Expanded its own solution portfolio without a sizeable upfront investment • Made technology more aaordable—and therefore accessible—to new clients and industries
“We’re integrating [the HPE Helion private cloud] directly into the Accenture hybrid cloud and our ACP hybrid cloud solution set. It provides a very powerful capability that allows us to bring to our customers a strong private cloud solution combined with a public cloud piece.” –Chip McCullough, Solutions & Go-to Market Lead – HPE, Accenture
With a reach that spans 120 countries and 40 diierent industries, Accenture is on the front lines of today’s rapidly evolving technology landscape. The global professional services company ooers a broad range of services and solutions in st strategy, consulting, digital practice, technology innovation, and operations. In recent years, and largely because of the public cloud,
Accenture has seen a significant shift in how its clients want to consume technology. Isolated hardware and software purchases have become a thing of the past. Instead, “Clients want to buy bundled technology packages that include the application, th the business process, and the infrastructure all integrated together,” says Accenture’s Chip McCullough, Solutions & Go-to Market Lead – HPE.
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But that’s just part of it. In addition to bundled solution packages, business leaders and, in turn, their IT organizations, want the simplicity of purchasing technology with the “swipe of a credit card.” Drawing from its own HPE Helion private cloud and the industry leading hardware, software, and services included in that ooering, Acc Accenture is serving up hybrid cloud solutions that are more in line with what its clients want.
A hybrid focus—because one size doesn’t fit all To help IT organizations empower their respective businesses, Accenture is focusing on the hybrid cloud space. It recognizes that no two businesses are alike. Some are more oriented toward the public cloud and others toward the private cloud. Finding the right mix requires a hybrid model that can be tailored to in individual business requirements. To this end, the company is excited about two key ooerings—Accenture Cloud Platform and Accenture Hybrid Cloud. Both are hybrid cloud solutions that launch clients on their respective journeys. “It depends on whether the customer wants to start with more of a focus on the public or private cloud,” says McCullough. “This will ultimately drive the diierent solutions we put in place for clients.”
Accenture builds on its HPE Helion foundation To drive solutions that satisfy clients’ specific and evolving needs, Accenture relies heavily on its own HPE Helion private cloud solution. “One of the goals within our Hewlett Packard Enterprise practice,” says McCullough, “Is to own the private cloud space within Accenture.” The company’s private cloud solution, leveraging HPE Helion OpenStack, is built on a pre-configured converged infrastructure that can be easily and rapidly deployed to support application environments.
The Accenture Dealer Management System (ADMS), for example, provides SAP hosting services for Caterpillar Inc. dealers. Transparent scalability of the HPE solution allows the infrastructure to scale up as Accenture onboards more dealers onto the platform. The HPE solution provides balanced building blocks of servers, storage, and networking, along with integrated management software. It also delivers a best-in-class virtualized infrastructure that is delivered as a single, proven solution that can support multiple hypervisors and enables cloud management. Both HPE Data Protector and the ne newer Recovery Manager Central (RMC) data protection solutions are available as part of Accenture’s solution ooering depending on the client use case. Accenture’s HPE Helion private cloud delivers, “Absolutely leading edge technology that we are able to take into the diierent ooerings and solutions we’re building for clients,” says McCullough. He adds, “We’re integrating it directly into the Accenture hybrid cloud and our ACP hybrid cloud solution set. It provides a very powerful capability that allows us to bring to our customers a strong private cloud solution combined with a public cloud piece.”
Powerful technology and flexible consumption model Three components of the HPE Helion solution make it easier for Accenture to build out solutions that better serve its clients. The first piece is HPE’s industry leading hardware, which Accenture uses as the foundation for many of its solutions. “If you look at Gartner and other analysts’ views,” says McCullough, “the HPE hardware solution absolutely st stands out. And we’re able to optimize our clients’ solution through this very powerful hardware set.”
For further information please contact your HPE representative, Julie Holland at Phone: +61 82228246 or Email: julie.holland@hpe.com
Customer at a glance HPE Helion Cloud Solution • Private Cloud Hardware • HPE ConvergedSystem 700 • HPE 3PAR Storage • HPE StoreOnce systems • HPE ConvergedSystem for SAP HANA (CS500 and CS900) Software • HPE Helion OpenStack • Windows Server 2012 • Redhat Linux • Suse Linux HPE services • HPE Flexible Capacity • HPE Datacenter Care (included in Flexible Capacity)
The second piece is HPE’s management toolset, especially operations, monitoring, and automation capabilities. HPE Operations Orchestration “has been quite powerful for Accenture as its out-of-the-box capabilities provide integration with both internal HPE tools as well as external toolsets.” McCullough adds, “We’ve been leveraging that extensively in several of our solutions to help drive automation within the diierent ooerings and capabilities that we’re delivering to clients.” The third critical piece to Accenture’s success is the HPE Flexible Capacity ooering. Accenture has bought into this capability because it allows the company to ooer a public cloud-type consumption model around private cloud hardware and software without forcing clients to invest in large upfront capital purchases. in “It literally allows our clients,” says McCullough, “to have on-premise hardware and software that very much looks like a credit card swipe that you see in the public cloud environment.”
Democratization of the cloud While the technology is a critical component of the solution, innovative business and consumption models are equally as important. The HPE Flexible Capacity component of the solution benefits everyone involved—Accenture, its clients, and HPE. According to Eric Brown, Managing Director at Accenture, Br Flexible Capacity helps Accenture bring more capabilities to its clients. “We’ve been able to deliver capabilities that clients, in the past, have not been able to aaord by allowing them to pay only for what they consume.”
McCullough elaborates, “Accenture traditionally is an asset light company, so we typically do not want to invest in significant assets as a part of our solutions. What Flexible Capacity allows us to do is to drive these assets into our as-a-service solution without the need to invest heavily up front.“ Of th course, what’s good for Accenture is good for HPE. “The Flexible Capacity program in itself has triggered particular momentum across Accenture for Hewlett Packard Enterprise,” admits McCullough, “and we’re seeing that grow significantly as we continue to leverage the program.”
Networking looks to the cloud Moving forward, Accenture is excited about innovative solutions it can bring to clients through its partnership with Hewlett Packard Enterprise. The company is focusing specifically on the networking space—and is creating solutions around next-generation software ar defined networking that, according to McCullough are “absolutely diierentiated in the marketplace.” The HPE Helion private cloud provides the foundation from which to build these solutions. “Underneath the networking is a Helion OpenStack solution running virtually all of the network functions,” Adds McCullough. “We expect nothing but huge growth for us in this networking space with our partnership with HPE over the next couple of years.”
Learn more at hpe.com/helion
For further information please contact your HPE representative, Julie Holland at Phone: +61 82228246 or Email: julie.holland@hpe.com
FedUni has opened a further campus in Berwick, Melbourne and about to open a new Brisbane campus later in the year. The Good Universities Guide has rated FedUni and its predecessor at five stars for Teaching Quality eight years in a row.
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Executive Director of ITS and Business Solutions (CIO) Andrew Tully, has very succinctly summarised the challenge facing the expanded institution. “In a competitive market defined by students juggling full-time study with part-time employment,
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or increasingly mature-age students juggling full-time employment, the student experience is enhanced by institutions that accommodate this and offer flexible course delivery with personal teaching engagement.� Significantly, these models are
opening up new market segments such as working adults or full-time carers who are unable or do not wish to commute long distances to a university campus. Similarly, there are life-long learners who do not wish to be constrained by the
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traditional 24 units of study but who want to ‘cherry pick’ units of study. Most universities and TAFE institutions are facing the same challenges. At FedUni this challenge of how to provide a ‘blended’ solution of online and on-campus provision is being met head on by Tully who was appointed just a year after the university was amalgamated with the mandate to transform the complex yet disparate technology landscape across the institution. It’s acknowledged that students will increasingly access their teaching
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and learning content on mobile devices, tablets anywhere, anytime. Cloud computing is disrupting the economics of delivering and supporting legacy IT systems, making ICT environments more readily available to smaller and medium sized enterprises, and giving them the ability to scale up and down as circumstances change. Large corporations are seizing the opportunities offered by capturing and managing big data, and keeping a very close watch on emerging technologies
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that can be bought in as a service, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive analytics. By making effective use of these new realities forms a key part of the university’s Hybrid Cloud Strategic plan for 2020. From 2014, the university has faced a variety of challenges, from digital disruption impacts, impending deregulation and potential reduction of fee subsidies at the state and federal levels. “Our vision was to transform a local university into a global operator in a context of an ever evolving sector whilst taking advantage of the
benefits and opportunities digital disruption offers. This is the challenge I am addressing at the moment,” says Tully. For a small university with comparatively limited IT resources compared with many of the larger Australian universities, this was a big ask. Straight away he tackled the task of transforming the ICT team into an ‘information and technical services directorate’ (ITS), in the process ending up with what he describes as a cross functional, bi-modal, integrated business service model. “Today our 64-strong ITS team is very
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“Today our 64-strong ITS team is very adaptable, very agile, and capable of taking on complex technological problems” – Andrew Tully, Executive Director of ITS and Business Solutions (CIO)
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adaptable, very agile, and capable of taking on complex technological problems” Tully adds. His boast is that with half the numbers of his closest competitor he can service the likes of blended on line learning, student retention and the other strategic priorities identified in the 2016 to 2020 Master Plan, which is arguably more complex than that of other institutions which don’t offer TAFE. What he has been able to create is a lean ITS service aligned with Enterprise Architecture principles whilst embracing a “lean manufacturing ethos” – delivering more with less. How is this being achieved? “We baked a cake!” says Tully – more of that later. Strategic partners Microsoft, Oracle, HP, and fraXses were invited to join the discussion. At the table, he gave each of them a FedUni baseball cap to emphasise the collaborative approach he wanted as one team. “This combination of these key partners has helped us develop our future architectural vision of where we could go at a technical level, using the Gartner PACE model, focusing on Systems of Record, of Differentiation
and of Innovation. We mapped our entire technology footprint against those three, and created a fourth which we called our Core Enabling Infrastructure. From there we went on to build our architecture blueprint based around ten core principals, some of those being ‘Student Centric, Educator Driven’, ‘Reuse, Buy then Build’ and ‘Information is an asset’ to name a few.” Once the structure of the team had been transformed and the cross functional bi-modal model was in place he set about building a ‘borderless’ technology footprint for the university. As part of the community engagement mission, in partnership with organisations in the Ballarat region like utilities, regional health and local councils, a partnership has started that is looking at sharing technologies and pooling resources that will not only help local organisations but assist the university meet regional challenges that ‘metropolitan’ universities might not face. Retaining and maximising technical resources is a good example. Ballarat is a relatively small place with
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“We leapfrogged over the traditional data warehouse model saving the University from significant investment. FedUni is breaking the mould” – Andrew Tully, Executive Director of ITS and Business Solutions (CIO)
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limited resources, and FedUni relies on true partnerships to consolidate expertise from wherever it can find it. The digital plan aims to enhance the blended learning and teaching experience that had contributed to the consistent five star rating. FedUni had no wish to go along the online-only road because it wanted to maintain its personal relationship with its students while leveraging the potential of other forms of online service provision. “We have a lot of students, including more mature students, who may not be as inclined to be as technology comfortable as their younger contemporaries. We want to create a positive learning experience for them all empowered by a digital campus experience that’s engaging, supportive yet lean.” The academic equivalent of customer churn, the process whereby competitors and new entrants to the market pinch customers from incumbent retailers or service providers, is student drop out. Not in the traditional sense, but students who are attracted away from universities by more flexible course providers.
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For FedUni the competitive market, fee deregulation and pure online providers are among the factors that challenge enrolment numbers and halt the decline in student retention. This is where one of the core principles in IT is key – Information is an asset. The university sits on plenty of data but that data was dispersed across various locations, through many systems, in multiple databases including PeopleSoft, Oracle, Postgress, MS SQL, Access, and in Excel and CSV files. The mass of data residing in social media formed
another great pool, but these sources were hard to access and not joined up. “We couldn’t easily identify which students were vulnerable: imagine the positive effect on student retention if we could use that material to give us insight into their individual situation? What is driving them, and what is holding them back, what else can we do to support them? What a personalised experience our student and teachers will have with such support and insight,” says Tully. To address this the ITS team turned to fraXses, a UK based company that
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has sounded the death knell for the traditional data warehouse. As a start fraXses explored and discovered the data repositories to establish what data existed, creating a single view by federating the different sources. It created what he describes as a ‘mature view of institutional data’, which at last brought some clarity to management, underpinning decisions realising the value of data. “Further to this, we’re constructing our ‘Intelligent Data Lake’ to enhance big data functionality.” In adopting this targeted approach and maximising its information assets, Tully scored a first. “FedUni was the first university to embrace Federated Data Virtualisation to get big data at our fingertips,” he says. “We leapfrogged over the traditional data warehouse model saving the University from significant investment. FedUni is breaking the mould”. Also, the ability to personalise data has affected more than just the human assets of the university – it has allowed it to take a more targeted approach to upgrading its assets, saving a lot of money – another lean initiative if you like.
To describe the complex IT structure that has been built we need to go back to the cake mentioned earlier. It’s an ingenious and graphic way to describe to the layman what can be a perplexing series of layers, but Andrew Tully’s recipe is simplicity itself. In the past he has used the relatively simple pizza as an analogy to describe the core and legacy systems: “You have the base, which is our core technology and on that different flavours that meet the tastes of the different people who like peperoni, pineapple and so on. The cheese in the middle is the information technology that glues it all together.” But the target for 2020 is a bit more interesting than that. His cake has two layers. The first “sponge” he calls the base layer, this is the Microsoft Azure Cloud, containing elements from what they refer to as the “Microsoft Experience”, productivity and communication tools within Office 365, OneDrive and Skype for Business, SharePoint and CRM offering scalability and backup. “All of that is being provided through our Microsoft partnership,” he explains.
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Going a little further up, the Amazon hybrid cloud model. The ‘icing’ on the cloud is a ‘lake’ of ‘ jam’ with tasty cake, is the fraXses technology we systems of innovative technology to be mentioned above, which assesses found in it such as data virtualisation and categorises data and makes it and ESB (Enterprise Service Bus). accessible to the institution as FedUni As we move through does not have a data the stack we have warehouse like all the some “large pieces others and the team is of ‘chocolate’, which proud being the ‘first’. represents institutional As digital data within our personalisation Systems of Record becomes more and Differentiation commonplace in – that is where our daily lives, so Oracle and fraXses too should staff, comes in providing students, lecturers us enterprise grade and researchers enjoy systems and metadata a slice of this IT cake acquisition / analytics that contains the respectively”. The ‘flavour’ specifically next ‘sponge’ – Andrew Tully, designed for them layer includes the Executive Director of ITS by simply selecting optimisation of and Business Solutions (CIO) their own ‘fruity existing on premise piece’. Everyone in the HP infrastructure along with the organisation, from Council members acquisition of new devices to to the newest student, can select their create reliable on premise disaster ‘cherry’. “In the future, consumers recovery (DR). Here, Finance and of my cake will get, the progressive HR systems are among the legacy digital campus experience, the functions represented within this information, the ‘flavour’ they
“This combination of key partners has helped us develop our future architectural vision”
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want, anytime and anywhere.” In what it is doing, FedUni’s ITS team has found a way of punching way above its weight, and made its mark in Australia and globally. Andrew Tully likes to think of it like the little unremarkable and shabby car, a kind of ‘Herbie’, which laps all the shiny (and much better funded) teams in the race, because they are encumbered by their monster truck tyres. “We are starting to pass, one by one, the competition because
our tyres are right. We are a lean and highly focused team of passionate resources, and have chosen our partners with care. So, data is king and the user based experience persona is queen within our hybrid Cloud architectural model. Underpinned by a cross functional, bimodal and adaptive team being the key. If you have the right data and the right approach and a team that is motivated, you can do anything you want to.”
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Mount Helen, Ballarat, Victoria, Australia Tel. 1800 333 864 federation.edu.au