About Evisions
Evisions, based in Irvine, California, provides software and data analysis solutions designed to help organizations work better by more easily accessing their data. The company has more than 900 clients worldwide in industries including higher education, utilities, and government.
Executive Summary
NorthBay Solutions uses AWS to help Evisions give colleges and universities fast, easy access to critical institutional data and drive new delivery models. An AWS Premier Consulting Partner and Public Sector Partner, NorthBay worked closely with Evisions to build new AWS-based software-as-a-service solutions for quickly and securely accessing data.
Helping Higher Education Institutions Drive Transformation
NorthBay Solutions is dedicated to helping higher education institutions innovate by doing more with their data. As an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Premier Consulting Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN) and a member of the Public Sector Partner Program, the software and technology consulting firm enables institutions to transform by moving their critical data to the cloud. “We consider ourselves a cloud transformation company, and we are proud to partner with AWS to enable that,” says Jim Keller, president of NorthBay. The organization has more than 350 AWS-certified employees and holds Education and DevOps competencies in the AWS Competency Program.
One NorthBay customer seeking cloud innovation is Evisions, a software solutions provider for higher education institutions. For over 20 years, Evisions has offered institutions on-premises tools to access and leverage administrative and student data. “We have very loyal clients, and they have made clear the challenges they are facing and how Evisions can best help them long into the future,” says Joe Potenza, president and chief executive officer of Evisions. “We are innovating with cloud-based delivery models to greatly improve how schools access and rely on their data—in ways designed to protect, leverage, and create extensibility of the significant technology investments they’ve already made.”
To successfully embark on this initiative, Evisions knew the importance of finding the right partner. Evisions evaluated different companies, but NorthBay offered the most advanced technology and comprehensive experience running on AWS.
Combining Cloud-Native Solutions with an Existing Product Line
Many front-line decision makers at learning institutions are not technology experts. Evisions sought to help those decision makers find information quickly, instead of them spending months trying to get answers from data. “Two of the main goals of our partnership with NorthBay were to ensure our products are compatible with a wider variety of solutions and to provide our clients a smooth glide path to the cloud,” says Peter Wilbur, technical product manager at Evisions.
NorthBay helped Evisions create an AWS-based transformative platform that features a new data ingestion layer, a software-as-a-service data lake, and a data consumption and access application. These solutions allow customers to expand data access more broadly across campus and automate repeatable tasks, allowing their technology and data experts to solve more pressing problems.
DORIS, a serverless data model based on AWS Lambda functions, automatically ingests institutional data, which is then sent to an enterprise data lake. The first focus for DORIS was to help automate the collection and submission of Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) survey data and allow institutional researchers to leverage that same clean source data for other insights.
The data access solution, CADMUS, allows customers to quickly and securely query data and create, combine, and extend data collections. CADMUS allows nontechnical users to access or create ad hoc data sets. Existing customers can connect their current Evisions toolset as one of the data source options.
Modern Solutions Deployed in One Year
Working together, leveraging NorthBay’s One Team approach, NorthBay and Evisions designed, built, and delivered the new data platform faster than anticipated. “By partnering with NorthBay, we were able to deploy two innovative technology solutions in one year, a timeline that is unprecedented in our industry,” says Kristy Elliott, head of product and partner success at Evisions. “Now, we can provide our customers with a path to modernization and reinforce our commitment to helping higher ed institutions evolve. Our investment in AWS technologies shows our customers we’re committed to providing them best-of-breed solutions.”
Once the new platform was in production, Evisions quickly met its customers’ needs. “NorthBay’s expertise, resources, and approach offered Evisions the agility and velocity to solve market problems faster, enabling our clients to generate more efficient business outcomes,” says Don Ashley, senior product manager at Evisions.
OneTeam Approach Makes Knowledge Transfer Seamless
Throughout the engagement, Evisions took advantage of NorthBay’s unique One Team approach, during which NorthBay teams worked virtually hand in hand with Evisions. “We help our customers achieve their business outcomes through our One Team delivery model, where we work as one team with them in an agile way to bring together processes, knowledge transfer, and customer team enablement,” says Keller.
As Evisions explores additional AWS services, the company will be well positioned to support future initiatives. “As institutions evolve and the market changes, Evisions is in a position to have self-sufficiency to work on the platform on their own,” says Keller. “They can continue meeting their customers’ demands because the solutions they’ve implemented will still be relevant five years from now and beyond.”
