Malaysian school integrates 11 campuses with CRM app

By SearchSMBAsia Editors | May 4, 2010

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To integrate campus student information systems at 11 separate campuses, and to centralize the management of the marketing and recruitment process, Malaysia's INTI Education Group has adopted an open-source based customer relationship management (CRM) application.

INTI’s campuses were each running different legacy systems developed in-house, which made getting accurate and updated information on potential students a challenge. As a result, information collation was done manually or by passing Microsoft Excel spreadsheets from department to department. “Whenever we need any information or report, it had to be compiled and collated manually,” said Richard Pany, group CIO, INTI Education Group. The group needed to find a way to integrate the campus student information systems and centralize management of the marketing and recruitment process for all the campuses.

Adopting a customer relationship management (CRM) solution proved to be a logical choice and INTI picked SugarCRM from iZENO, a Red Hat Infocomm Local Industry Upgrading Programme (iLIUP) Partner. The open-source based CRM solution was chosen for its flexibility and cost-effectiveness.

The next challenge was to find a platform to integrate the various legacy systems, which did not have readily available integration interfaces.

Following a detailed evaluation of the performance and reliability of Red Hat's solutions and Mule ESB, the companies’ presence in the region, and the maturity of their products, INTI decided to implement Red Hat's JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to run and integrate SugarCRM with its existing systems.

“Using the enterprise service bus (ESB) within the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform allowed us t to make our service reusable and increase development productivity,” said Pany. “We also believe that open source prevents vendor lock in. We chose Red Hat because it is based on open standards, which translates to lower costs and greater flexibility.”

The system, which runs on a Dell server with storage attached network (SAN) that support across all the applications in the infrastructure, went live on November 2009 after a month of data integration.

Since its deployment, the new Red Hat platform and middleware solutions have proven to be stable and reliable. INTI now has a full-scope view of each student's information in a single view, rather than scattered across systems. The integration of data was seamless, eliminated human input errors and makes the information available in realtime.

“With the integration of our systems in the various campuses, information is no longer available in bits and pieces,” said Pany. “With the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, there is less manual processing of data and duplicated information and effort within the organization. As such, efficiency has increased while cost has been reduced, thanks to a cut in number of human errors.”

Reports that previously took up to three days to produce on a monthly basis can now be generated daily and consolidated at the group level. With help from Red Hat technologies, INTI has gained a competitive edge in the market.

“With JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform and Red Hat Enterprise Linux supporting our SugarCRM system, we have gained flexibility and transparency while increasing returns from sales and marketing activities,” said Pany.