The University of South Africa (Unisa) has slashed its upgrade costs by more than half since moving off its mainframe to open systems technology for its student registration process.
The downsizing exercise - carried out over a number of years - was a combined project of Bytes Business Solutions, a company in the JSE-listed Altron Group, and a development team from Unisa.
With more than 60 000 registrations annually, Unisa is one of the largest distance learning institutions in the Southern Hemisphere. "The direct benefit to Unisa has come from saving at least half the operational cost on hardware compared to our proprietary mainframe, without any degradation in quality of service," says Vic Stipinovich, IT director at Unisa.
The total cost for the project was R8 million, which included consultation and the supply of COOL:Gen, Computer Associates` application development environment represented locally by Bytes Business Solutions.
Selection of the development tool involved visits to overseas vendors and consultations with overseas analysts such as Gartner and Meta Groups. The tool had to be enterprise-strength, and able to cope with high volumes and multiple users.
The registration process is core to the university`s activities, and the introduction of the semester system during development and the detailed level of data and stringent validation needed by a distance learning institution added to the complexity of the application.
"We have also experienced reduced maintenance burden compared to the mainframe," adds Stipinovich. The open nature of the system allowed for a number of customisations, and the new registration process has coped well with unusually heavy transaction loads during the normal registration periods, all while proving its stability, he concludes.
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