Vlerick Business School Firmly Opts For a Cloud-First Strategy
Vlerick Business School’s digital transformation was brought to life with Azure in close collaboration with Codit, ensuring seamless integration of applications and enabling continuous innovation.
‘Walk your talk’ would be a fitting way to describe the digital strategy of Vlerick Business School. The institution offers a wide range of leadership programs and courses on digitalization and new technologies. Over the past 10 years, it has also made significant investments to become a digital leader. Vlerick Business School chose to move entirely to the cloud. This enables the school to continuously improve and adapt its services. Codit plays an important role in ensuring seamless communication between all applications.
When you’re managing around twenty applications, moving to the cloud is not a simple switch. That’s why Vlerick Business School launched the LEAP transition program some ten years ago. IT Manager Wim Wauterickx explains: “The ambition was clear: we wanted to become fully cloud-based. But during the transition phase, our applications had to remain operational. We also needed the flexibility to develop new solutions for both internal users and external clients. This is why we developed a strategic multi-year roadmap. Our final application will migrate from on-premise to the cloud in the coming year – it’s the Student Information System.”
The transition was influenced by Vlerick’s internationalization strategy. The business school aspires to be in the top 15 in Europe and therefore attracts a lot of international professors and participants. “Even before Covid, it was clear that we needed online programs in addition to our physical offering. Our international faculty and students needed remote access to their applications and content. By using cloud services, it becomes irrelevant whether a user is on campus, at home or abroad,” says Wauterickx.
Azure helps to scale up
The transition to the Microsoft Azure cloud is now nearly complete. “We were already using several applications from the Microsoft ecosystem. One example is a Learning Management System for students that we developed back in the day, based on SharePoint. These experiences made us build further on Azure,” says enterprise architect Luc Van Cauwenberge. “It’s the right platform for us to scale and easily integrate new applications. We’ve taken our cloud transition quite far. For instance, we use VoIP for telephony, fully integrated into the Teams environment.”
“Since our IT team is relatively small, it made sense to halt our own development and instead focus on connectivity, architecture and support,” Wim Wauterickx adds. “We had experienced that custom software require a lot of maintenance and upgrades. It’s challenging to keep up with new developments on the market. Finally, custom development has a slowing effect on your digitization strategy.”
API integrations are crucial
An important thing to mention regarding the new IT landscape of the Vlerick Business School is the close collaboration between the different applications. Luc Van Cauwenberge: “Each application needs something from another: information from the CRM system for invoicing and payments, specific access data for an application, content for the website, and so on. Our challenge was to enable our cloud applications to communicate with each other in a controlled, secure, and well-managed way. This is crucial because we want to further automate certain processes in the future.”
Vlerick already had a long-standing collaboration with Codit around Microsoft integrations. “When we laid out the blueprint for our new IT architecture, it became clear that we needed highly specialized expertise in cloud application management and API integration. Since Codit has such expertise in-house, we decided to partner with them,” says Van Cauwenberge.
“We knew each other from an earlier phase, back when we were still using Microsoft BizTalk Server for our integrations. Codit guided us through the migration to a modern, cloud-based integration architecture based on Microsoft Azure. That evolution laid the foundation for long-term collaboration.
Azure is constantly evolving, with each innovation offering new opportunities and options. It’s almost a full-time job to keep up. Codit is fully at home in the technology and alerts us to interesting developments as soon as they become available. Their support goes far beyond the technical part of integrations.”
A new roadmap
Meanwhile, the IT team is working on a new roadmap to guide the next phase of Vlerick Business School’s digital transformation. Wim Wauterickx explains: “We’re engaging colleagues from all departments to identify current and future needs. It’s already clear that we are evolving into a data-oriented organization, deploying AI and PowerBI. Within the IT department, and in close collaboration with our partners, we are exploring how to make the shift and what the budgetary framework is. One thing is certain: we’re continuing to build on Microsoft technology. This will ensure that our strategic decisions can be smoothly and securely integrated within the existing ecosystem. A key area we want to explore with Codit is how to embed AI into our current systems to generate added value. We’re counting on their expertise in that area as well.”
A word from the client
“We rely on Codit to ensure smooth integration of cloud-based applications.”
Wim Wauterickx IT Manager
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