Butler Community College Graduates to Oracle Cloud with Help From Tharseo IT

Challenges

Established in 1927, Butler Community College is a public, two-year co-educational institution located in El Dorado, Kansas. It’s the second largest community college and sixth largest educational institution in the state with over 13,000 students and 1,200 employees.

For years, Butler has been running its business and student operations on Ellucian Banner, a popular ERP system designed for colleges and universities. Built on an Oracle Database, the system helps the college manage everything from the school’s finance and HR departments to online student enrollment and grade tracking. Recently, Butler found itself at a crossroads: Its Ellucian software was aging and needed an upgrade, and the hardware at the college’s data center, which hosted its applications, was nearing end of life. As a result, the college would often experience slow system performance and downtime events. Patching and
upgrading the on-premise software was difficult and the college’s lack of a robust disaster recovery solution posed the risk of major system failure that could impact business and student operations. It became clear to IT leaders that the college needed to modernize
its IT infrastructure. But keeping its on-premise data center would be costly and require purchasing a new array of servers — a major capital expense. Leaders began searching for new solution that was cost-effective and easy to maintain while providing a higher level of
performance and reliability. In addition, Butler needed to migrate to a new solution seamlessly without interrupting college operations.

Solutions

Butler looked at a range of options for modernizing operations, but early on saw the advantages of moving to a cloud platform for its Ellucian ERP and student systems and Oracle Database. IT leaders embraced the idea of radically shrinking its datacenter footprint
and avoiding unpredictable hits to its capital budgets. In addition, it could free up staff by spending less time maintaining on-premise hardware and software.

The institution reviewed several cloud solution providers — including Ellucian’s own cloud option — but after looking closely at Oracle’s cloud solution, IT leaders decided to adopt Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).

To help with the transition to Oracle Cloud, Butler turned to Tharseo IT, an expert in OCI technology and migration projects. Tharseo was an ideal partner for Butler, managing the entire migration of Ellucian and other third-party apps to OCI testing environment in less than three months.