N2N Services, Inc., a leading platform provider for Higher Education systems integration, today announced a strategic partnership with Boomi™, a Dell Technologies business, a leading enterprise data management and data integration provider.
This collaboration allows N2N’s customers to experience Boomi features embedded with the Illuminate platform. N2N’s customers can leverage integrated Illuminate APIs with additional data sources using Boomi’s advanced development tools, and overall technology ecosystem. “The Boomi partnership will have an immediate impact by expanding our API development capabilities and integration options.” according to Danielle Whitney, VP of Business Development at N2N Services. “Pairing Boomi technology with our deep higher education industry expertise and existing integration libraries will allow N2N to quickly and affordably deliver complex integration solutions.”
By integrating the Boomi Platform with N2N’s Illuminate Platform, N2N will be able to provide complete end-to-end visibility into Illuminate connectors and process flows as well as detailed performance metrics. N2N will also be able to provide additional connectors and advanced development options to customers. Boomi’s Technology Partner Program provides invaluable enablement resources for our development effort, enabling us to accelerate building interoperability between the Boomi Platform and N2N’s Illuminate Platform.
“We are thrilled to have N2N Services join the Boomi partner program as an OEM provider. Boomi is a great fit for N2N’s Illuminate platform and will help N2N further drive innovations within the Higher Education vertical,” said David Tavolaro, Boomi’s Vice President, Global Business Development.
“Boomi’s platform will allow N2N to quickly expand our Integration APIs and offerings which will provide the flexibility and connectivity that our higher education customers need,” said Kiran Kodithala, CEO and founder of N2N Services. “Boomi’s Partner Program will help us deliver additional integration and development options across our platform so we can provide seamlessly integrated solutions quickly and deliver greater customer success. We are excited to be part of the Boomi Program.”
You know, you’d think that at an institution of higher learning, of all places, there would be some sort of exception to the whole ‘human limitation’ thing.
Colleges and universities exude an atmosphere of hope, ambition, excitement, drive, innovation, and endless possibilities.
They’re the breeding grounds for dreams to come true, and bright new futures to be created.
Nevertheless, each day still only has 24 hours, and human beings can only do so much – even at a college.
And your beleaguered admissions staff can definitely attest to that.
Given the Herculean task of keeping up with both the management of applications and student enrollment data, as well as marketing the institution to potential new students, they do what they can, and then some.
Manually inputting data…dealing with data quality headaches…fighting through integration hassles…wasting time looking up data in disparate databases…coming up with creative workarounds to keep the data straight…trying to fit marketing in somewhere…
Come to think of it, they do already push the limits of human endurance!
But just imagine if you could give them a little boost – something to make those human limits a little less restrictive – and add some extra time back into their day.
Nope, we’re not talking about rejiggering Daylight Savings Time. We’re talking about a simple process automation that can relieve stress, get your data processed more quickly and accurately, and free up time for more strategic activities.
We’re talking about integration via the Illuminate platform.
We know, we know, you’ve already got integrations in place. But hear us out.
Illuminate is an API Management Platform that elegantly integrates every single one of your institution’s apps, databases, and programs, so that they can all communicate in real-time. Its IDMatch add-on module handles data quality assurance, preventing duplicate student records and finding errors.
So just imagine:
Instead of spending time manually inputting data for a new student’s enrollment, only to find out that the student actually already exists in the system under a slightly different name, thus skewing the analytics data and creating another headache as the two records now need to be manually merged, and despairing because those marketing materials still need to be finalized and mailed out sometime this week…
…your staff can be laser-focused on strategic marketing activities based on your newly accurate, real-time admissions data, while Illuminate and IDMatch hum away in the background, instantly sending all the data input by applicants online directly to the correct apps and databases and checking it automatically against existing records for duplicates and errors.
For a modest monthly subscription fee, it’s like hiring an entire second admissions team to take over the tedious data management tasks sucking the time away from your current staff.
And to be honest, you do get an entirely new team on your side when you use the Illuminate platform. N2N’s customer support is second to none, and we are always just a phone call away.
So while we can’t actually help you defy the limitations of human existence, we can help you make that existence much more pleasant for your admissions staff – and everyone at your institution. And that may be just as good. Give us a call today to see what we can do for you.
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that an admissions department in possession of a reasonably-sized staff…probably still doesn’t have the resources to spend much time thinking about marketing.”
-What Jane Austen would have said if she’d worked in higher ed in the 21st century
What kind of growth in enrollment numbers do you think you’d see at your college or university, if your admissions department actually had the resources to focus on truly strategic marketing?
It could be a game changer, right?
Realistically, though, most admissions departments just don’t have the time.
Sure, they send out periodic mailings and emails, and scramble to get a few other things done where they can.
But that isn’t their primary focus.
That can’t be their primary focus – because they have to keep the student enrollment data flowing.
They spend most of their day wrestling with student data – inputting it manually, checking it for duplicates and errors, moving it between apps and databases, and dealing with integration headaches.
So, short of hiring an entire second admissions team to handle the marketing side of things, what’s a university to do?
Here’s a 4-step plan that will enable your existing admissions staff to turn a strategic eye to marketing and boost its efficacy exponentially, while still accounting for the realities of data management.
Determine what your biggest resource drain is.
Before we can begin our new approach to marketing, we need to make room for it in the schedule. So take a hard look at the tasks your admissions staff handles every day. Which one or two take up the most time? Is it manual data entry? Are they dealing with data quality issues all day? Is it putting out fires in the existing integrations you’ve got in place? Find the top one or two time sucks for your staff.
Find a way to automate that process.
Now, take those one or two resource-draining tasks and find a way to automate them. And no, we don’t mean yet another piecemeal integration project. Look at the big picture, and find the smartest, most affordable way to create a single, unified system that deals with all your data issues at once.
We’d like to humbly recommend that you take a look at N2N’s Illuminate platform, with its IDMatch add-on. Illuminate is an API Management Platform that integrates all your apps and databases so that they can all communicate seamlessly, in real-time – so no more manual data entry or integration hassles for your team. And IDMatch takes care of any data quality woes and worries, eliminating duplicate and erroneous records. For a surprisingly affordable monthly fee, you can easily take all the work that’s been overwhelming your admissions staff and automate it. It’ll get done more quickly and more accurately, and you’ll have your team’s undying gratitude. Win-win!
Assess where your marketing efforts would be most effective.
Another benefit of N2N’s Illuminate platform is the easy access to accurate, real-time analytics data it enables. So not only will your admissions team have more time for marketing activities, they’ll have a more detailed picture of where those marketing efforts would best be spent. Which high schools send them the most applicants, or the highest caliber students? They’ll be able to build a data-driven strategy to target exactly the right audience.
Implement your strategy.
All that’s left now is to set that marketing strategy in motion. With exponentially more time available to your admissions staff, and all the data they need at their fingertips, they can forge ahead and ramp up those marketing activities – and your college can reap the rewards.
This 4-step plan isn’t just theory – we’ve helped college after college, university after university put it into practice, and we’d love to help your institution, as well. Give us a call today to find out more about how we can help you turn your admissions department into a marketing machine.
You sit down at a table, ready for your first meeting of the week. And you can already feel it coming. You know what’s about to be discussed…and you know that you’re probably going to have to temper someone’s enthusiasm about a new project, and be the one to inject a dose of harsh reality into the conversation.
What’s the one IT obstacle that’s guaranteed to come up in every discussion about adding a new app, or trying any new approach to pretty much anything that involves tech?
What’s the one IT issue that makes you groan and reach for that third cup of joe, because it takes too much time, and too much money, but people want it done anyway?
Integration.
We know it, and so do you. And you know who else knows it? Educause.
In their list of the Top 10 IT Issues of 2019, Educause ranks Digital Integrations right smack dab in the middle of those top 10 issues, second only to mega issues like data security and student success.
And, unlike data security and student success, it’s an issue that’s often not understood to be the complex, necessary component of your overall IT set-up that it is.
Educause lists 3 common misconceptions you may be dealing with when it comes to integration. How many of these ring a bell for you?
It’s quick and easy to deploy and integrate a new app. Yeah…no. As much as vendors like to promise that their app is super easy to integrate with your SIS, that’s just not the reality, with institutional IT ecosystems as complex as they are. Something’s gonna need some custom coding…which means time and money that was probably already promised to someone else’s project.
Your IT team can easily set an accurate timeline for a new integration project. Well, I mean, you can set a timeline – it’s just that it’s pretty much guaranteed to change as you move through the project and come up against new issues and changing expectations.
“What happens in departments stays in departments.” Nope, sorry. It may work for Vegas, but even stand-alone apps used by individual departments need to be vetted and integrated into an institution’s overall IT architecture.
So, here’s the thing. As you know all too well, these are all misconceptions…
…unless you have the right integration tool.
Having the right tool in place makes integrating new apps easy and quick, allows your team to accurately predict how long set-up will take, and even boosts departmental independence by empowering them to experiment with any new apps they’d like and innovate left and right, without having to beg for IT time and resources.
And what is the right tool?
N2N’s Illuminate app.
Illuminate allows your team to integrate apps in minutes without custom coding. It’s an API management platform that just completely removes the problem of integration.
It becomes a non-issue.
And instead of dreading those Monday morning meetings, you can look forward to sharing your colleagues’ enthusiasm over new projects.
How do you make decisions at your college or university?
Do you toss a coin? Pick out of a hat? Consult the augurs?
Of course not!
As all geeks, nerds, and dweebs know, data makes the world go ‘round.
Every organization uses data to make decisions.
From student enrollment data informing your decisions to offer certain classes, to analytics reports on recent ad campaigns changing your approach to marketing, data tells you where your needs are so you can fill them, and what’s working and what’s not, so you can adapt.
But sometimes, the data isn’t good, and sometimes it isn’t complete. Sometimes it’s not the right data to be looking at for that particular decision. Sometimes it’s very basic data that’s not giving a nuanced picture of the situation. And sometimes, you can’t seem to find any relevant data to help in your decision-making process at all!
And if that’s the case…then the decisions that you’re making won’t be the right ones.
It’s crucial for every decision maker, at every level of your institution, to have access to quality, complete, timely, in-depth data that provides actionable insights.
While that’s usually pretty easy at a departmental level – since each department has access to their own silo of data – it becomes a lot trickier when someone needs data from multiple apps or databases in order to make a decision that will affect the direction of the entire institution.
And it gets even worse when you’re talking about an entire college system needing data from various departments in each of its schools!
So what does it take to become a data-enabled institution – or college system?
Data integration.
And not just any old data integration, but smart data integration that ensures both data quality and seamless, real-time communication between every single app, program, and system your institution uses.
Individual, custom-coded data integrations just ain’t gonna cut it here – the more of those you have to create and maintain and add to over the years, the more tangled your data gets. And every new app added to the mix brings a new layer of complexity. It’s just not sustainable long-term.
What you need is a single, unified, overarching data and analytics strategy that then carries over into the approach you use for data integration.
Your perfect data integration partner? N2N, with our Illuminate app.
Illuminate is an API Management Platform that elegantly integrates every app, system, and database your institution uses, whether they’re on-premise or SaaS. It assures data quality, prevents duplicate records and other errors, and enables a real-time flow of data between all your departments and data feeds. And it makes it simple and quick to add new apps to your IT ecosystem anytime.
It’s easy to implement and customize, surprisingly affordable, and comes with the unmatched customer support we provide here at N2N.
Anyone needing to make an informed, data-driven decision can easily access all the information they need, with Illuminate providing the conduit. So whether you’re a single institution looking to take another step into the future, or an entire state college system coming up with innovative new ways to serve your students, call N2N today. We’ll help you get the data you need to ensure every step you take is a successful one.
