Driving new digital experiences for students: Tribal Group graduates to multi-cloud environment

Education services provider appoints Rackspace to drive new digital offerings and user engagements for higher and further education students worldwide

Rackspace, the technology services company, has been appointed by global education software and services provider Tribal Group to support its move to a multi-cloud environment, as well as develop and jointly deliver public cloud for its customers.

Rackspace supported Tribal Group with its move to a multi-cloud environment and collaboratively developed a public-cloud first strategy that expands the education service provider’s new offering across Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure, while simultaneously supporting a significant platform migration of existing customers.

Through this multi-cloud strategy, Tribal Group has strengthened its market leadership. Over an 18-month period following the launch of the new cloud offering, 90 per cent of its new customers have opted in. The majority of its new business is now delivered in the cloud and a number of existing customers have engaged in digital transformation programmes to take advantage of the public cloud offering.

Tribal Group has also achieved cost efficiencies across its business through the shift from a capital expense (CapEx) model under the previous private cloud approach to a more fluid Operating Expense (OpEx) model in the public cloud. Tribal’s customers have also benefited from a more robust, scalable and flexible provision for some of their core IT services, allowing them to focus on other projects to improve their education provision.

With over 4,000 customers across five continents – including University of Oxford and University of Sydney – Tribal Group is one of the largest providers to the higher education and vocational sectors. It supplies student management systems to more than half of the UK’s higher education institutions and supports universities with fully managed shared services.

Graham Barton, Commercial Director, Cloud Services at Tribal Group, said:

“The education sector is moving very quickly, with rapidly changing student expectations, including more demand for digital delivery, which puts pressure on education providers to transform. Rackspace helped us tackle the complexity of moving to a multi-cloud environment and accelerate time to value for customers.

“We now have a coherent and strong cloud offering, which has further cemented our leadership position. But given the market dynamics, we cannot pause and must continue to evolve. Rackspace’s guidance and expertise has been, and will be, absolutely critical as we continue along our journey.”

Nick Henry, General Manager, Managed Public Cloud, EMEA at Rackspace, said:

“We are committed to helping our customers generate real value from a cloud service model in terms of technology agility, cost flexibility and service assurance. For Tribal Group, this meant getting under the skin of the pressures its customers are facing – from digitisation to meeting security requirements — and achieving cost efficiencies and best practices.”