The INTI Education Group is a pioneer and one of the most respected and trusted names in the private higher education sector. With 11 campuses in Malaysia and Indonesia, INTI has grown over the years and has strategic alliances with some of the biggest and most trusted names in the higher education sector globally. It began a new chapter in 2008 when it became part of the Laureate International Universities (LIU) network, making the group part of a global entity that spans 20 countries worldwide.
As INTI's campuses were running different legacy systems, getting accurate and updated information on potential students was a challenge. Information collation was done manually or by passing Microsoft Excel spreadsheets from department to department.
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 do not have readily available integration interfaces.
Following a detailed evaluation, INTI decided on Red Hat JBoss service oriented architecture (SOA) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to run and integrate SugarCRM with its existing systems.
The group's criteria were proven case studies, presence in the region and product maturity.
"Using this enterprise service bus (ESB)-based SOA system, we want to make our service reusable and increase development productivity. We also believe that open source prevents vendor lock in," said Richard Pany, Group CIO of INTI Education Group. "We chose Red Hat because it is based on open source, which translates to lower cost."
The system, which runs on a Dell server with storage attached network (SAN) and VMware, went live in November 2009.
Since its deployment, Richard pointed out that the system has proven to be stable and reliable.
"With the integration of our systems in the various campuses, information is no longer available in bits and pieces," he said.
Data need not be re-entered, eliminating human input errors, and is available real-time.
"With JBoss SOA, there is less manual processing of data and duplicated information/effort within the organization. As such, efficiency has increased while cost has been reduced, thanks to a cut in number of human errors," said Richard.
Reports that used to take up to three days to produce each month can now be generated daily and consolidated at the group level.
"With JBoss SOA and Red Hat Enterprise Linux supporting our SugarCRM system, we have gained much visibility of our business and increased returns from sales and marketing activities," said Richard, who feels that Red Hat has given his organization a competitive edge in the market.
He is pleased with Red Hat/JBoss subscription model and looks forward to new innovations and product upgrades as his organisation scales this solution to other regions.
