The Ellucian Ethos Framework is a data integration platform designed for higher education institutions and their business structures. The Ethos Framework can be extended to include other Ellucian products for greater analytics, workflow, and mobile capacities.
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Jitterbit
Score 6.7 out of 10
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Jitterbit is a cloud integration technology for cloud, social or mobile apps. It provides accessibility for
non-technical users, including easily creating API’s and data transformation scripts within the
integrations.
Ethos Integration is a work in progress. Some API's are still not available under this framework. However, it has the advantage of being an abstraction layer on top of the database, supports the publish-subscribe model. Since some Banner 9 modules still do not support the direct SAML2 connection, Ethos Identity (EIS Server) is a necessity for SSO.
This is a great tool for bringing data out of your locked, internal systems and getting it into the cloud. It meshes well with Salesforce and is fairly easy to use, helping the transition from other older, more complex tools into a more modern environment. It has lots of competition in this space and some are better than others, but if your data is straight forward and you know it well, Jitterbit will get the job done. If you are not as close or comfortable with your data and need to do some wildly complex migrations, there might be better packages out there for you.
Operational reporting: This does not replace or provide an easy platform for operational reports or warehousing. It would be nice if they provided a full stack.
Learning curve: Training and documentation are minimal.
Migrating operations from QA to Production work well for initial deployment, however, when migrating an update to an existing job to production, sometimes certain project items are duplicated. This is not the end of the world... the duplicates can be removed, but would be nice if it was not required.
I have not found a way to trap under-the-covers SOAP errors (for example, when a query you are running against Salesforce takes too long). You get a warning error in the operation log that the job only pulled a "partial" file, but it does not fail.
I have been evaluating other tools as a continuous improvement practice. I would like something that would be easier to use for a non-technical user. I work for a small organization and have no back-up for Jitterbit if something happens to me. We don't have the technically savvy employees to understand it.
Support from Ellucian for Ethos Integration was generally good. The help in building Ethos was adequate, and resolving issues were handled professionally. However, for Ethos Identity module, the support in building the cluster failover architecture was lacking. After over a month of open engagement, the issue still has not been resolved.
We have not used any other product similar to this, but for us, it made sense that the first product we tried was made by the company who developed our ERP system because they know the system inside/out. Solutions made by other companies that only look into documentation does not mean they would be able to create a product that could do such integration well.
Evaluated Dell Boomi and Celigo as alternatives prior to purchasing Jitterbit. We went with Jitterbit at that time because we could handle all changes ourselves without any assistance from Jitterbit, and we liked their size and nimbleness. Dell Boomi was too big for us, and Celigo at that time did not have a self-service model. Every change had to go through them (although that has since changed). We were not in a position to be able to wait for someone to make changes for us given the rate of change within the business.
The time it takes to connect systems has reduced by orders of magnitude. Previously, we would custom-develop connectors between various systems and they would all be managed by different vendors. With Jitterbit speed-to-deploy and the efficiency gained by managing all connections in one dashboard has been the greatest piece of the ROI.
