PRESS RELEASE: Australian Catholic University partners with SXiQ, an IBM company, to deliver a digital transformation program of work for staff and students
SXiQ, an IBM Company
Melbourne, 19 September 2022 – News release
Australian Catholic University partners with SXiQ, an IBM company, to deliver a digital transformation program of work for staff and students.
Australian Catholic University (ACU) is a top 2% world-ranked university and sits in the global top ten of Catholic universities. It operates seven campuses in Australia, an eighth in Rome and has more than 33,000 students, over 125,000 alumni and around 2,500 staff. ACU stands for meaningful education, impactful research, and life-changing community engagement.
ACU is on a strategic digital transformation journey, to optimise learning, teaching, research, and services; enabling more collaboration, innovation, and the ability to deliver new solutions for staff and students.
A key program of work in this strategic journey is the merger of multiple Microsoft 365 tenancies into a single tenancy for ACU staff and students. The current environment – one tenancy for staff and one tenancy for students – is hindering learning and preventing effective collaboration between the two groups. The tenancy migration and merger program of work will combine the tenancies, streamline communications, improve collaboration for students and staff, and ultimately simplify IT operational support processes and scalability for the university.
Niranjan Prabhu, Chief Information Officer and Director of IT at ACU, says “this migration plays a critical role in fulfilling our strategic goals for the university, setting us up to continue to improve and enhance the student and staff user experience.”
ACU was clear in its request for an endorsed Microsoft partner with deep experience in performing complex Microsoft 365 tenancy migrations and mergers. SXiQ has delivered multiple complex, time-critical, identity and Microsoft 365 tenancy migrations and mergers for some of Australia’s largest and best-known brands, helping those organisations better collaborate with their teams, customers and supply-chains.
Niranjan Prabhu said SXiQ was selected for this project based on its:
• Real-world examples of success based on previous engagements;
• Deep technical expertise and understanding of the ACU environment, with a commitment to delivering a better user experience;
• Extensive working knowledge of security and identity and its importance – not just to the solution but to ACU’s overall user-security;
• Demonstrated architecture and design capabilities, with thorough designs not just for migrating and merging the tenancies, but also substantially improving collaboration across all user types;
• Unique proposition of providing ACU a partner that possesses start-up speed and agility with enterprise skills and scale – backed by IBM’s global capability;
• Extensive migration and modernisation experience in a complex, mission-critical, highly integrated environment; and
• Deep knowledge, extensive experience, and expertise in the Microsoft-way, with multiple Gold Certifications and having achieved Microsoft Advanced Specialisation Partner status (one of very few partners in Australia to do so).
John Hanna, CEO at SXiQ said “Our team’s deep understanding of Microsoft’s Teams and Active Directory environments allowed us to architect a migration approach that not only solves the collaboration issues being experienced, but one that acts as an enabler for future digital transformation. This program of work will enable ACU to collaborate, innovate and embrace regular platform and capability changes regularly, securely, and at speed across their entire user group.”
This project of work is expected to deliver a host of benefits for ACU, helping to drive a seamless experience for students and employees and reducing operational costs. “Ultimately, our digital transformation strategy is about supporting ACU students and all our staff,” says Mr Prabhu, “by making smart decisions about technology deployment we are enabling continuous innovation and creating an agile, optimised way of learning and work.”
