Item: Ellucian Ethos
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Penn is in the process of implementation of Banner FinAid and Banner Student modules. Ethos Integration is used in non-prod environments so far for integrations. Ethos Identity is used in production to provide SSO authentication via SAML-CAS bridge.

Pros and Cons

Ethos Integration obfuscates database access from the developers and functional users.
Ethos Integration provides common-denominator data model between different systems on campus.
Ethos Integration has good management tool - API Management Center.
Ethos Identity allows easy federated access with our Shibboleth IDP provider.

Ethos Integration - The traditional Banner API library is still much superior to the one available in Ethos. Not all APIs are available in Ethos.
Ethos Integration - Performance is not robust enough under the pick load.
Ethos Identity - The latest version is difficult to configure in a cluster-failover set-up.

Return on Investment

It's premature to evaluate that, since Ethos Integration is not in production yet. We would expect the reduction of cost due to elimination of some home-grown development.

Alternatives Considered

The integrations with Banner and other systems are currently done by home-grown systems.

Support Rating

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.

Key Insights

Do you think Ellucian Ethos delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Ellucian Ethos's feature set?

Yes

Did Ellucian Ethos live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of Ellucian Ethos go as expected?

Would you buy Ellucian Ethos again?

Yes

Other Software Used

Oracle Database, Ellucian Banner, Oracle SQL Developer, Toad for Oracle, Oracle Database Cloud Service

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Promising, but still a work in progress

Overall Satisfaction with Ellucian Ethos