Mule beats Oracle, others for integrating with Oracle ERP

The University of the Witwatersrand (www.wits.ac.za) is one of South Africa’s premier research universities.  With over 30,000 active students at any time it is also one of the largest.   When faced with a required migration of their central student system, the most important system in the university, the university selected Mule ESB to decouple components and provide a reliable integration framework through the migration and beyond.

“Management of students is the core business of the university.  When we touch the student system we touch every facet of the university.  We’re very comfortable having Mule as the integration layer around the student system.  It has proven itself robust, scalable and high performance.  We’re very glad we chose Mule”

Susnato Mukherjee, Project Manager, Student Information Management System.

The University of the Witwatersrand, commonly known as Wits University, is one of South Africa’s premier research universities.  With over 30,000 active students at any time, and over 4,000 staff members, it is also one of the largest.  The records of these students as well as historical records for alumni are managed by a central student system operated by the Computer Network Services (CNS) office of the university.  CNS also develops, supports and maintains custom applications for all departments of the university including many that interface to the student system.

The Wits student system performs many critical functions and has many touch points.  The system maintains all student records including applicant data, offers of admissions, academic history, financial aid, graduation records, and letters and correspondences with students.  Approximately 500 users directly access the student system.

In 2006 Wits implemented an Oracle-based Student System as part of a large Oracle ERP deployment including Oracle Financials, Oracle HR and other components.  However, CNS chose to eschew the Oracle SOA suite in favor of Mule ESB for integration with the ERP suite.  “While we use a lot of Oracle in house, we’re very keen on lightweight solutions to problems.  Mule ESB offers simpler, more efficient development than the alternatives” said Chris Baker, Java Development Team Lead for the University of the Witwatersrand.  “Additionally, we’re a big Java shop and our Java developers can quickly learn Mule.  It means we don’t need a special group of costly integration specialists.  Any of our Java developers can do integration with Mule.”

In 2007, the university received a notice from Oracle that their existing student system would be reaching end of life in 2013.  After an evaluation of alternatives, the university decided upon Oracle’s PeopleSoft Campus Solutions as their new student system.  To facilitate the move from the old Oracle system to Campus Solutions, CNS needed to split the Student and HR systems, which ran in one large Oracle instance.  This required additional integration between the two Oracle products, Campus Solutions and other ancillary systems.  Integration would be key to making the transition seamless.

The Solution: Mule ESB as a central integration platform

Even before the student system migration, Wits already heavily used Mule for mission critical applications and use cases.  Mule is used to integrate a number of systems with the existing Oracle ERP implementation.  For example, it is used for transactional systems such as fees and receipting where it posts transaction on a queue and asynchronously empties this queue to the Oracle ERP system.  It also manages credit and debit transactions, splitting credits from debits and delivering each to a different place.  Outside of ERP-related use cases, Mule is also used for batch jobs, moving text files, and other uses within the university.

“Our experience with Mule ESB over the years has been superb.  Our Mule instance has been running for years without issue.  I think it has only been shut down once, very briefly, and that was for a scheduled change.  As I see it, Mule is essentially completely reliable” said Baker.

Given the university’s positive experience with Mule, it was immediately a strong candidate for consideration as the integration layer for the migration project. Nonetheless, upon kicking off the new project in September 2010, CNS conducted an extensive evaluation of several alternatives.  Ultimately Mule was selected as the best alternative.  “We looked around the market, but we decided we didn’t need a huge SOA suite implementation.  We didn’t need a JBOSS ESB and we certainly didn’t want the full Oracle SOA Suite.  They came with a lot more dependencies and complexities than we needed.  We felt the more we had to manage the more there was to go wrong.  We needed reliability and ease of implementation, not bloat” said Susnato Mukherjee, Project Manager for the University of the Witwatersrand.

The entire replacement of such a key component of the university posed timing challenges.  It was essential that the integration components of the project could be rapidly built and deployed in order to avoid project delays.  “What’s great about Mule is it’s a lightweight, standalone ESB.  It’s very easy to deploy“ said Mukherjee “This enabled us to meet our aggressive schedule.”

The first step in the migration process was to split the HR and student system of the university to facilitate eventual replacement of the student system.  In June of 2011 the single massive Oracle instance was split into two smaller ones.  Mule acts as a mediator and data integrator between these two systems, allowing them to behave as if they were still combined.  The integration of these two systems requires lower latency and higher reliability than some of the previous use cases.  “Despite pretty strict performance requirements, Mule behaved flawlessly as always” said Baker. “We experienced no issues during this very sensitive time in the migration.” added Mukherjee. 

In 2012 the Campus Solutions-based student system will be deployed in phases.  The admissions module of the solution will be deployed in March 2012, followed by all other modules in December 2012.  Mule will make this migration completely transparent both between modules and out to other systems by abstracting system details.

One of the key advantages of selecting Mule is how quickly Wits has been able to deploy new services and change configurations as they move through the steps of the integration project.  “Mule is quite easy for developers.  To date there’s not a single line of Java code within our Mule implementation.  Everything we do leverages the out-of-the box capabilities of Mule.  You can develop without getting too deep into the code” said Baker.  This allows the university to quickly make changes as components of the new student system are rolled out without extensive development efforts.

The migration and increased use of Mule will also allow for improved service for students and departments alike.  “Oracle products can be somewhat monolithic.  As we migrate off of them we want to provide additional value to our students and academic departments.  Mule will help us do that” said Mukherjee.  The university plans to deploy new self-service capabilities over time allowing students to access records, financial aid, bank accounts, and more.  They also plan to integrate Syllabus Plus, a scheduling system, in order to delegate course scheduling to individual schools rather than the centralized management currently used.  They will also improve tracking of dissertation outputs, requiring additional integration.

Throughout the development process the university engaged MuleSoft with questions on best practices and issues they encountered.  “We got excellent support from MuleSoft.  We had many questions and the MuleSoft support team was always quick with information, tips and tricks, and best practices.  The project would have taken much longer without their help” said Baker.

“Management of students is the core business of the university.  When we touch the student system we touch every facet of the university.  We’re very comfortable having Mule as the integration layer around the student system.  It has proven itself robust, scalable and high performance.  We’re very glad we chose Mule” said Mukherjee.