Westmont College

Reed Sheard, CIO and Joel Banez, Director of College Software of Westmont College detail how WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud integration brings agility and flexibility as well as empower them to meet their business goals in higher education.

Video Transcript

Westmont’s a wonderful place because it has a long history of academic excellence, preparing men and women to go out, really serve in every severe society around the planet in truly effective ways

I’m actually the first Chief Information Officer at Westmont College in its history. The college has learned over the last few years that the importance of robust technology solutions for our students, for our staff, for our faculty, isn’t just something that’s tactically important but it has become strategically important
I had four months to create a campaign.

In looking at the goals for the capital campaign, I estimated that we would have to talk to about twice as many people in order to raise the same amount of money

Joel Banez
Since I’ve been here, we’ve discovered that we have a lot of data in different silos, so it seemed really to make sense to be able to say, so now that we have the data in these locations, how do we strengthen our position so that we can use the data for Westmont. And as we’ve figured out that we’ve got an integration opportunity here, that tools like Cast Iron would be integral to that strategy.

Reed
No one knows our business like we know our business, but the Cast Iron expertise in the professional services team, when they came to Westmont, worked side by side with us.

Joel
A tool like WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud Integration can do for us is to meld these information together, keep them where they are, but at the same time, be able to consume them, and for developing a better data infrastructure strategy for Westmont.

Without WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud Integration, it would have been impossible to get this real-time connection between meeting notes – absolutely indispensable in managing an effective relationship with many, many donors – and having that written back into our ERP system.

WebSphere Cast Iron Cloud Integration has allowed us to achieve a lot of ROI. I’m happy to report that in the 11 months since the campaign began in April, that we’re almost 50 percent of our way to our goal in less than one year, and I really feel that the tools that we’ve chosen, the partners that we worked with, our commitment to the cloud, have all made a huge difference in the effectiveness that the team currently enjoys.

The college is on the move and it’s really doing remarkable things around the world, and it was a privilege and an opportunity for me to be a part of that. And the great thing about working with IBM is that IBM is a leader, and I think when you bring a really smart company like IBM alongside a school on the move like Westmont College, remarkable things can happen.