Eduardo Monteiro

Associate Director of Enterprise Systems , Florida International University (FIU)

Supernova Award Category: 
Tech Optimization and Modernization
The Organization: 

Florida International University (FIU), Miami’s public research university, offers bachelor's, master's, & doctoral degrees, & has graduated over 275,000 alumni to date. One of the university’s strategic initiatives is student success: providing students the tools needed to succeed in their academic journey & prepared for the job market. FIU has 2 campuses & multiple centers. FIU serves a diverse student body of more than 56,000 and 300,000+ Panther alumni. U.S. News & World Report places dozens of FIU programs among the best in the nation, including intl. bus, at #2. Washington Magazine ranks FIU among the top 20 public univ's contributing to public good. 

The Problem: 

To support their initiative: student success, IT built a robust student information system (SIS) and a mobile app, which enables about 100,000 users to manage their entire student lifecycle. But, over the last few years, a change in student expectations required IT to overhaul its legacy processes to deliver the seamless online, collaborative experience students wanted. To do so FIU IT needed to ensure the SIS and mobile app could scale with the business and deliver the in-demand experiences.But, the FIU Mobile app and SIS were built on legacy code and infrastructure. Over time, the SIS grew into a fragmented monolith that needed to have third party vendors and cloud applications integrated to deliver optimal student experiences. But, integration, of which there were 40 applications for FIU Mobile from transit to dining locations, was manual. Every integration had to be built from the ground up. “We were using a variety of programming languages and technologies, and integrations lived in different systems across our infrastructure,” said Associate Director of Enterprise Systems, Eduardo Montiero. 100% of a developer’s time was needed for each integration, which could take up to two months. IT needed to find a centralized solution that would enable it to reuse components for faster, automated integrations.

The Solution: 

FIU IT looked for low-code int. platforms and received demos from others, incl Mulesoft and Jitterbit. What attracted them to Boomi was its ease of use, the abilities to reuse components they’d already built and to build integrations w/ Boomi’s pre-built connectors, its efficient easy integration with other Boomi solutions like API Mngmt. “During the Boomi demo, we optimized existing resources and completed an integration within a couple of hours, and that integration is live today,” said Montiero. Within weeks of purchasing Boomi, FIU IT was deploying integrations. Boomi is now the preferred tool for any integration at FIU. FIU students have a variety of online, collaborative 3rd party applications they can have experiences w/ from orientation to advising, to graduation. Boomi helps ensure that the data students see in those apps and the FIU Mobile app is integrated w/ the SIS in near real-time.

The Results: 

Before Boomi, student experiences consisted of logging into PeopleSoft, as that was the only screen they had for their entire student journey. With Boomi, students now interact with the SIS through a variety of front ends: including the FIU Mobile app, the MyFIU portal, or a variety of third party applications that directly integrate with the SIS through Boomi. For example, FIU has systems for advising, orientation, registration etc. With Boomi, students can now drag and drop activities and classes onto their schedules and it all goes back to the SIS, the system of record.“As we onboard more and more third party applications to be part of the SIS ecosystem, it is critical to have the data integrations done as quickly as possible. With Boomi, what used to take months now takes weeks, and we're able to have the students using a new system in a short amount of time”.FIU has completed 80 integrations with Boomi including PeopleSoft, Barnes and Noble and Duolingo. The Duolingo-SIS integration benefits students taking the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) exam, as they can take it in their preferred interface with Boomi ensuring the data automatically gets into the SIS for admissions officers to evaluate.The backend of the FIU Mobile app was rebuilt in two months using Boomi Integrate and API Mngmt; a staggering feat considering the initial build of the app on legacy infrastructure took 10 years. The app is live today and serves nearly 100,000 users.

Metrics: 

FIU has completed 80 integrations with Boomi including PeopleSoft, Barnes and Noble and Duolingo among many others.

“With Boomi we are 10 times faster in building integrations than we were before,” said Monteiro.

The backend of the FIU Mobile app was rebuilt in two months using Boomi Integrate and API Management; a staggering feat considering the initial build of the app on legacy infrastructure took 10 years. The app is live today and serves nearly 100,000 users.

“We can see in one platform where our data is going, how many integrations we have. We can see if we need to rebuild something or if we can reuse something that's already there. So that has become a much more efficient way of building integrations than what we had before where someone would just build everything manually line by line. And we're really happy with what we have today,” said Montiero.

“With Boomi, there are many cost saving angles. Before we had Boomi, to build a simple integration we had to create a standalone server and host it in the cloud. And that lead to support and overhead costs. Now with Boomi, everything runs on the platform and not only we can build things cheaper, but it's much faster to deploy than before.”

Number of employees and students: 60,000

Revenue :$483.8 million USD in 2022

The Technology: 

With the Boomi platform—a cloud-native, unified, open and intelligent integration platform—organizations can build integrated experiences faster by automating workflows, consolidating data, orchestrating business processes, and making intelligent connections. 

Additionally, Boomi leverages low code to help organizations save thousands of hours in development costs and address digital transformation imperatives.

Disruptive Factor: 

FIU Mobile is an app that has been live since 2007, and enables users to engage with the university and many of its third party vendors. FIU IT spent 10 years building FIU Mobile, manually building its backend. 

“Before Boomi, when we had to build an integration for FIU Mobile, we had to dedicate 100% of a developer's time, and it would take up to two months to finish a single system integration.

With Boomi, FIU rebuilt its mobile app in two months, enabling seamless transition for 100,000 users.

 By using the Boomi platform, businesses are able to modernize and become more adaptable in a constantly changing market. Through the Boomi unified platform’s extensive connectivity, you can extend application and data integration capabilities to any business applications including online/offline mobile apps and web portals.

Shining Moment: 

“Before Boomi, we were hesitant to take on new projects that involved integrations because they could take months. But now, we are able to say ‘yes’ to most integration projects because they only take days or weeks to implement with Boomi,” said Montiero.

“An IT success indicator is when users don't notice something major has changed. With Boomi we were able to shift the entire infrastructure of the FIU Mobile app in the backend and no one noticed".

About Florida International University (FIU)

Boomi aims to make the world a better place by connecting everyone to everything, anywhere. As a SaaS leader, Boomi touts the largest customer base among integration platform vendors and a worldwide network of approximately 800 partners. Global organizations turn to Boomi to discover, manage, and orchestrate data while connecting applications, processes, and people for better, faster outcomes.