Bryant University

Bryant University Customer Reference

Rich Siedzik: Bryant University is a campus of about 3,300 students. Most students are residential students. We have two colleges here at the university, a college of business and a college of arts and sciences. Most of the students are enrolled in our college of business.

Ron Machtley: About eight years ago, we started our first strategic plan. Our vision then is our vision now and it will be the vision for Bryant in the future, and that is that Bryant would be the place of choice for students who want an education in a world of technology which is global.

Arthur Gloster: In 2005, the institution had grown in technology from a just infancy to total demand for technology with a laptop program where every student on the campus is given a laptop.

So every student is really connected to the network at the university and totally dependent on the capabilities of technology to get their education.

Rich Siedzik: The pressure that we were facing on a day-to-day basis was really one of, we had several constraints, space, cooling, power and how to provide up-to-date cutting edge services to our students and our faculty.

IBM took us down a new and very innovative path with a scalable modular infrastructure from APC.

And that path was different because it really didn’t have any of the legacy components a traditional data center has. We have a data center designed state of the art with hot year, cold year, aisle arrangements.

We could take quite a bit of less real estate with the IBM BladeCenter servers, also their high performance, their efficiencies and their reliability was critical.

Arthur Gloster: The greatest return on investment for this project from our perspective has been really with the efficiency we have gained with a new hardware…

Rich Siedzik: We pretty much standardized on operating systems and everything that surrounds that, which has really brought efficiencies, it has saved about 30% overhead and administrative overhead day to day.

A lot of our time was not doing what I would call our core IT competencies. It was taking care of aged and some very strained mechanical and electrical equipment. We have since gained all of that time back where now we can really focus on strategic things, things that will have a direct impact on the community of the university.

What made the implementation most successful from my point of view was IBM’s attention in detail. They were very, very thorough.

Arthur Gloster: We are looking at a long-term relationship with the IBM Corporation primarily because we feel that they have a leadership role in both the software and also with the technology innovation.

Ron Machtley: It’s important to work with institutions which have brand, which have capacity and capability. IBM certainly has all three of these. And so when we are working with technology and we want our institution at Bryant as one of the leader in the field of technology, we want to have partners, institutions like IBM.