More info relative to the hosting discussion

UA Campus Community,

Sorry I haven’t posted earlier, but there’s been a lot of progress and at the same time one of the key questions remains open.

In my previous post I mentioned two initiatives that we were involved in, the pilot PeopleSoft deployment in partnership with ASU and an RFP for hardware and co-location facilities, I would like to share the available results with you.

As noted in blog my post on September 6, 2008, the pilot partnership with ASU has reached completion and with measurable success.  It is fair to say that during this process we learned a lot about deploying, managing and sustaining PeopleSoft environments.  We have continued this deployment effort locally with the assistance of a consulting firm known as The Burgundy Group and have continued to deploy environments in support of each initiative in the Mosaic realm.  It is fair to say that we continue to learn about the many nuances associated with building and maintaining these very complex environments, and without the assistance of our partners at The Burgundy Group we would be distinctly lower on the learning curve than we are today.

Our second challenge was to issue an RFP for hosting solutions.  If you remember we tailored the RFP in such a way as to solicit responses for hardware alone, data center co location facilities alone, or a combination of the two.  We received a number of viable responses to the RFP and after painstaking analysis and discussion awarded the hardware purchasing component to Dell.  We did not award this particular RFP to any of the respondants for the data center co-location and/or environment management RFP.  However, we remain open to the possibility that these systems be hosted offsite and/or managed as part of a managed services arrangement.  That discussion is ongoing with the goal of reaching a conclusion prior to taking any of the production Mosaic deliverables live.

I sincerely hope that explains the current situation in the hosting discussion and answers any questions anyone may have.  Please do feel free to post comments to this blog and/or bring any comments or questions to me directly.

Thank You!