Member Article

Talend Solutions open the doors in Newcastle University

Students and staff at Newcastle University are set to benefit from improved access to its facilities following the successful implementation of Talend Enterprise ESB and Data Integration solutions.

Newcastle University is home to over 17,000 students and over 5,000 staff, and is a secure campus based on swipe card access systems to buildings and residential sites. The University’s door security system comprises a number of different legacy based implementations and technologies, all served from a central hub on campus.

Jan Hesselberth of Newcastle University explains: “The synchronisation of security information and access rights, down to the various discrete systems and card readers across campus, historically happens on a batch basis once a day. For students and staff this means that in reality they have to wait up to 24 hours before any changes to access rights are effective at the door level.”

“This is an acute issue at the start of an academic year when thousands of new swipe cards are issued and existing ones are modified, let alone on a day-by-day basis throughout the academic year. For Newcastle it is simply not acceptable that staff or students are denied access at any time thanks to a delay in synchronisation!”

Talend Enterprise ESB, formerly Talend ESB Enterprise Edition, is a reliable and scalable enterprise service bus (ESB), which will enable Newcastle University to bring data from different applications together to manage their campus-wide security, accurately and in real time.

Hesselberth continues: “We have been using Talend for a number of projects, not least for its data management solution, Talend Enterprise Data Integration, which has helped the institution to securely streamline a number of processes necessary for us to manage huge data volumes efficiently. It was therefore a natural extension for us to look to Talend and its other data solutions when it came to this project.”

Talend Enterprise ESB enables Newcastle University to adopt a real-time, event-based model for the distribution and synchronisation of security data right down to the local system and card readers throughout the campus.

Key events such as new card enablement and access rights changes will be synchronised in real-time across the entire campus, ensuring that any changes are effected immediately therefore avoiding delays associated with the historic system. For students and staff alike that means unhindered access to all buildings all the time.

François Méro, vice president of global sales, Talend, concluded: “Talend Enterprise ESB is the ideal solution for application integration projects such as this. By providing an open source solution to address this integration challenge, Newcastle University has made use of a versatile and flexible solution which has transformed how data is exchanged between the various applications it is running to deliver a real-time answer to a very real problem.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Teradata .