Colleges, universities and other centers of higher education collect a lot of information about their students. That data then disappears into legacy systems and custom applications. Breaking those silos can bring out the real power of that data and enable institutions to take intelligent action to guide students through their educational journey, according to Jeff Ralyea (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of cloud at Ellucian Inc.

“Ellucian has a sole focus on higher education. It’s really the only industry we serve,” Ralyea said, during the AWS Public Sector Summit in Washington, D.C.

Ralyea spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and John Walls (@JohnWalls21), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s mobile live-streaming studio, about the importance of unlocking data and using insights. (* Disclosure below.)

Guiding students to data-driven success

Ellucian comes to educational organizations from an enterprise software perspective. It finds its bread and butter in the student systems, although the company does serve other areas. In particular, Ellucian runs systems that help students achieve success. Registration and recruitment make up just two examples for a suite of software that helps drive this outcome, Ralyea explained.

Likewise, unlocking the data in higher education is a really big deal. Systems that have lived on campus for decades hold all sorts of information about students. To tap this well, Ellucian built a platform, Ethos, that uses a new data model that sits above all the original systems. Then, they set this platform to run “role-based analytics” to discover new insights about the students, Ralyea stated.

Most of Ellucian’s customers run their software on-premises. To deal with that, the company uses a set of common APIs that push the data into an AWS Cloud environment. From there, the data flows into special databases that are designed to quickly pull insights from educational data.

“There’s been a clear mandate from our customers to help them do a better job of using the information they’re collecting,” Ralyea said.

To translate those insights, Ellucian uses a solution called Advise that gathers student information into similar cohorts that serve as the basis for predictive models. From those models, the institution can see which students are standouts or at risk and why. From there, the administration can take action, Ralyea concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s independent editorial coverage of the AWS Public Sector Summit. (* Disclosure: Amazon Web Services Inc. sponsored this AWS Public Sector Summit segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither Amazon Web Services nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE