Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) Completes the Migration of Four PeopleSoft Applications to the AWS Cloud in Record Time
SBCTC PeopleSoft AWS Migration and Automation
Background
Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges (SBCTC) gathered requirements for new administrative software solutions in 2011, issued an RFP in 2012, and selected PeopleSoft Campus Solutions (CS), Human Capital Management (HCM), Financials and Supply Chain Management (FSCM), and Interaction Hub (Portal) as its new administrative solutions in 2013. Three colleges were selected as the first pilot group for the implementation. These colleges went live in August 2015.
As part of the implementation project, SBCTC engaged a professional services vendor (PS) and a cloud infrastructure services vendor (IS). Unfortunately, SBCTC’s PS partner filed for bankruptcy protection in April 2017 forcing SBCTC to search for another partner. After a second RFP process, commenced in November 2017 and awarded in January 2018, SBCTC selected The Burgundy Group, Inc. (TBGI) as their new professional services vendor and the AWS Cloud (AWS) as their new infrastructure services vendor.
Work on the migration from IS to AWS commenced in early March 2018 with a target go live date of June 11, 2018. After an intense effort by all involved, the migration project went live on AWS as planned with no material issues experienced.
Established Architecture and Proprietary Tools
TBGI created a standard architecture and a set of environment management automations (Smart EMS) during the migration of University or Arizona’s (UA) PeopleSoft applications beginning in July 2015. UA was insistent on using as much delivered AWS functionality as possible in the new architecture. TBGI fully embraced this approach and in addition created a set of automations to manage the migrated solution in AWS.
The result of the project was a standardized architecture, made possible by a combination of CloudFormation templates and Docker containers, and TBGI’s proprietary event engine (Envy) which coordinates and monitors both AWS-delivered and TBGI-custom services to create and manage the PeopleSoft environments. This approach means that all PeopleSoft environments, including production, are reliable, consistent, and ephemeral. All environments can be managed, on a one-time or scheduled basis, using Smart EMS functionality.
Because TBGI was able to bring an established architecture and Smart EMS to bear on SBCTC’s migration project, the initial environments were available for user testing by the end of March 2018. That gave SBCTC enough time to schedule testing cycles and prepare for their go live just within contractual deadlines.
Result
SBCTC was able to go live with the production migration on June 11, 2018, within their contractual deadlines. In addition to the migration, SBCTC also completed a PeopleTools upgrade for each of the four applications during the initial project. The automated PeopleSoft environments solution benefited not only their infrastructure migration, but also their implementation project more generally. Because of Smart EMS, TBGI was able to provision and manage as many as 170 project-related environments during the implementation project.
“With the use of AWS automation, the Burgundy Group has provided us with a solution that is not only responsive, but also reliable and cost-effective. Their services have enabled our high demand environments to appear nimble and effortless. We appreciate having a partner we trust to provide both the flexibility and reliability our customers demand.”
Grant Rodeheaver
WA State Board for Community and Technical Colleges
Deputy Executive Director, Information Technology
SBCTC
The Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges advocates, coordinates and directs Washington state’s system of 34 public community and technical colleges. Each year, SBCTC helps about 262,000 students train for the workforce, prepare to transfer to a university, gain basic math and English skills, or pursue continuing education. SBCTC students, graduates and community partners increase Washington state’s quality of life and economic vitality as entrepreneurs, employees, consumers and taxpayers.
TBGI
Established in 1998, TBGI provides PeopleSoft application, Oracle database and AWS infrastructure managed and consulting services. TBGI proprietary tools include a set of PeopleSoft environment management automations for the AWS cloud, Smart EMS. Smart EMS can (on a one-time or scheduled basis) launch, terminate, back up, refresh, up scale, down scale, apply operating system (OS) and PeopleTools patches, and monitor PeopleSoft environments in the AWS Cloud.
Contact us today to see how Smart EMS can help save your organization time and effort deploying and managing PeopleSoft environments in the AWS Cloud.
