Grove City turned to Sesame Software and its Relational Junction suite of data replication and integration products as part of a plan to move the bulk of the college’s admission related data out of the cloud and on to local servers.
Grove City College
Founded in 1876 under a charter mandating it be open to qualified students without regard to religious test or belief, Grove City College has spent the past 140 years focused on providing students with intellectual, moral, spiritual and social development consistent with a commitment to Christian truth, morals and freedom. Grove City College boasts state-of-the-art learning, research and living facilities for approximately 2,500 undergraduate students pursuing degree programs in everything from accounting, business and computer science to education, music, philosophy and psychology. More than 90 percent of students at Grove City College live on campus, and many participate in Residence Life activities such as Bible study and intramural sports. The college also offers more than 130 clubs and organizations, including Greek organizations, service groups, choirs and bands. Student athletes can play for the Grove City College Wolverines, competing in the NCAA Division III Presidents’ Athletic Conference.
Industry:
Education
Headquarters:
Grove City, PA
Use Case:
College needs high performing, data and replication solution
“It’s been a huge benefit for the college and it’s ended up saving us money. In the Return on Investment (ROI) world in which we operate, Relational Junction pays for itself.”
– Alan Roberts, Grove City College Director of Enterprise Services
CHALLENGE
One of the many selling points for Grove City College, a well-respected Christian liberal arts institution, is that the tuition for its approximately 2,500 students is about half the national average. Keeping the school affordable requires the college administrators and staff to keep a close eye on all expenses, and that includes the costs associated with the management and storage of all the data used for admissions and recruitment of new students.
Several years ago Grove City College Director of Enterprise Services Alan Roberts realized the expenditures for its cloud-based storage solution kept rising with every 500 MB of new data generated by the school.
“Cloud-based storage was getting expensive and I didn’t want to keep going in and asking for more money,” he says.
SOLUTION
Looking for a better solution, Roberts turned to Sesame Software and its Relational Junction suite of data replication and integration products as part of a plan to move the bulk of the college’s admission related data out of the cloud and on to local servers.
“Sesame Software and Relational Junction allowed us to pull that data out from expensive cloud disc space and store it locally in inexpensive disc space,” he explains.
Because it is based on the SQL programming language used by data management professionals for decades, Roberts says Relational Junction provides other benefits as well, including ease of use for data integration and report generation functions.
Roberts notes that while he administers the admissions and recruitment database on his own, members of the Grove City College admissions team can generate reports from the school’s local servers without the need for additional commands or programming.
CONCLUSION
“We realized how nice it is to have that data in a place where it was more in our control,” he says. “We know that it’s there, we don’t have to worry about it being out in the cloud and wondering what’s going on with it.” Roberts says working with Sesame Software’s knowledgeable support staff has been very easy, adding each time there’s an update to the CRM platform used by the college, such as the introduction of new Salesforce objects or new fields, Relational Junction automatically adds them to the database.
He’s also found Relational Junction works seamlessly with the Jenzabar student information system software used by the college. “It’s been a huge benefit for the college and it’s ended up saving us money,” says Roberts, adding he plans on continuing to use Relational Junction going forward. “In the Return on Investment (ROI) world in which we operate, Relational Junction pays for itself.”
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