Ad Astra: Reducing Time to Deliver Client Results from Months to Weeks

Ad Astra is higher education’s solution partner in managing the academic enterprise. Partnering with more than 500 colleges, universities, and systems nationwide, Ad Astra helps improve stewardship of instructional resources, streamline student access to courses, and accelerate student completions. Their goal is to help colleges and universities graduate more students faster.

To help schools and students together, Ad Astra pulls large volumes of data from multiple student information systems. This ERP holds 90% or more data for a school, including information on students and instructors, classes, student history, and financial information. When college deans and other staff start building class schedules at the beginning of a semester, there are countless times when they run into bugs within the ERP, which require lengthy SLAs (usually months at a time) to fix, causing a rippling effect that would eventually impact students. They needed a reliable way to solve these data ingestion challenges so students and the educational institutions could better engage with one another.

Ad Astra designated several internal teams to try and tackle their data ingestion challenges in-house. They first tried to pull all the data themselves from the disparate systems instead of trying to transform it, which led Ad Astra to create their own data ingestion agent. This solution allowed the company to move data successfully into Amazon S3. However, the development teams had to focus primarily on major student information systems (representing 80% of Ad Astra’s clients) instead of all systems simultaneously.

This left around 20% of Ad Astra’s customers unaccounted for and pushed Ad Astra into the data ingestion business—not core to their mission of providing software to higher education. As a result, the organization knew it had to adopt a solution like StreamSets to handle its data integration so it could focus on helping students graduate faster.