University of Canterbury(MIS100 2009)

By CIO staff | Friday, July 24 2009

2008 ranking: 24

Senior IS executive: Clive Martis, director ICT services
Reports to: Deputy vice chancellor
Size of IS shop: 140

PCs: 4600
Mobile PCs: 230
Terminals: 320
Hand-held devices: 100
Total screens: 5250

Industry: Educational services
PC environment: Lenovo, Cyclone, Dell, Apple, Windows XP, Red Hat, Linux
Server environment: HP, Sun, Apple, Windows 2003, Red Hat
DBMS: SQL, Oracle, MySQL
Address: University Drive, Ilam, Christchurch
Website: www.canterbury.ac.nz
Key IS projects this year: Second datacentre; mobile computing and remote services management; HR system upgrade, infrastructure refresh/expansion.

A new primary datacentre housing administrative and academic college-based computing, as well as the BlueFern IBM supercomputing facility provides state of the art facilities for the University of Canterbury, says Clive Martis, director information and communication technology services.

Teltrac manages an outsourced telecommunications Help Desk and maintains uUniversity cabling infrastructure, while Telecom continues to provide connectivity. In partnership with Gen-i, a Nortel IP Core, VoIP solution with Microsoft OCS has been selected as the future path toward unified telecommunications.

Providing University staff with a secure remote experience similar to that delivered on-site at the university, is supported by F5 Networks Firepass appliances. Martis says the F5’s replace a number of existing remote access methods, and will be matched with a Microsoft TS2008 and Citrix implementation to facilitate teleworking from any available platform.

In 2009 ICT budgets will be changing to a measured benefits model, which will work with an executive level Information Systems Steering Group to drive the scaling of operational and capital resources allocated to meet prioritised business needs. Microsoft Project Portfolio will be used to help provide the overview.

The University is also engaged in upgrading its PeopleSoft HR system, reviewing web management and adding finance reporting and process management tools to the mix.

Departmental printing has been consolidated to a preferred supplier model, with Ricoh winning the primary delivery of MFD and printing solutions to the University.