Tribal Group, a leading provider of software and services to the international education market, has announced that it has signed a contract with the University of Sydney to migrate Tribal’s Student Management System (SMS), SITS:Vision, to the Tribal SITS: Cloud on a five year subscription.
SITS:Vision was initially selected by the University of Sydney in 2009 and is designed by and for higher education providers. It enables educational institutions to support and improve the entire student lifecycle from recruitment and admissions, through student support and retention to outcomes and alumni management.
The university now wants to deliver a high quality, secure service, with less fragility and to mitigate risks for one of its most critical services. In addition, the university is also looking to achieve cost efficiencies by contracting to Tribal Group for the maintenance of infrastructure and the sourcing of skilled resources to maintain the service.
Following a review, Tribal Group will now provide SITS:Vision as an application in the cloud to deliver efficiencies for the institution. The SITS: Cloud Service provides end-to-end services with Tribal Group taking full stack responsibility and clear accountability.
Tribal Group will manage and be accountable for systems, application, infrastructure and component upgrades, patching and backups, databases and service availability. Historically, these systems were hosted and managed in-house by university staff with support provided by Tribal.
“Moving our largest and most crucial on-premise system to Tribal cloud managed service aligns perfectly with the university’s cloud-first system strategy,” said Caroline Hungerford, ICT Director, Office of the CIO, Enterprise Systems Strategy, SydneyStudent Information and Communications Technology, The University of Sydney.
“Together with the operational efficiencies and locked-in cost savings, the benefits of the university not having to plan and execute annual major upgrades made this a compelling and straight forward decision. The other benefit of this move for the university will be the seamless transition from the legacy SITS system to the Tribal SaaS system as the relevant modules become available.
“We look forward to the completion of the migration to the Tribal cloud and the realization of the benefits this new service provides to the university.”
In addition to migrating SITS:Vision to the cloud, the university also required a functionally rich, flexible and scalable system to meet new Australian Government statutory reporting requirements of Tertiary Collection of Student Information (TCSI).
In order to meet these new obligations, the university will also adopt Tribal’s TCSI solution, Tribal Edge Submissions, a native cloud based multi-tenanted solution which delivers critical student data directly into TCSI through an intuitive user interface to reduce risk and streamline submissions.
Mark Pickett, Tribal Group’s CEO, said: “I am delighted that the University of Sydney, one of the world’s leading universities, has selected Tribal’s SITS:Cloud service for the provision of a critical student service. This will provide the university with the high quality and secure student administration service that is essential for an excellent student experience, a key ingredient for success in an increasingly competitive higher education market.
“We see growing demand for cloud services in the education sector, which may further increase because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our SITS:Cloud service is uniquely positioned to assist customers in addressing those challenges.”
