Background
Vanderbilt University, located in Nashville, Tennessee, is a private research university with approximately 12,000 students hailing from all 50 U.S. states and over 90 foreign countries. It offers more than 70 undergraduate majors and a full range of graduate and professional degrees across 10 schools and colleges. Vanderbilt has more than 145,000 alumni, with 40 alumni clubs established worldwide. Except for the off-campus observatory, all the university’s facilities are situated on its 330-acre campus in the heart of Nashville.
Use Case
Vanderbilt University’s Office of Investments (OOI) manages the university’s $3.2 billion endowment. The university required a system for accurate and timely reporting of endowment investments.
The risk management team needed an application that could integrate and map data from multiple internal and external sources in a timely and repeatable manner and give accurate reports of the endowment’s factor risk exposures. The solution needed to be web-based, with an easy-to-use front end for business users, as well as a sophisticated engine to deliver the analytics necessary for the university’s stakeholders.
Enter Astera
The OOI evaluated all of the leading data integration platforms and selected Astera for its superior usability, functionality, and affordability.
Astera’s high-performance, scalable data integration platform allowed Vanderbilt University to keep up with advanced data needs. Powered by an enterprise-grade, parallel processing engine, Astera offered the university data syncing, mapping, transformation, parsing, and extraction capabilities, all through a single platform.
By leveraging Astera’s dataflow, workflow, and scheduling capabilities, Vanderbilt was able to quickly develop integration jobs to automatically retrieve and map data from external money managers and internal systems into the endowment tracking software. With Astera, Vanderbilt University has quick turnaround times and a short learning curve for executing data integration, migration, and mapping tasks. The project has been so successful that Vanderbilt is now deploying Astera in other areas to enhance existing processes.
Astera met all our criteria for high developer productivity, excellent performance, workflow design, and process automation. My team sat through multiple SSIS seminars and spent many hours with other competing tools and the learning curve was rather steep. Astera, on the other hand, was amazingly intuitive and seemed familiar. With assistance from the excellent Astera support team, we were able to develop fairly complex dataflows within hours.