University of Portsmouth cuts integration times from months to weeks
The University of Portsmouth has successfully realised a digital transformation project to replace its legacy system, and modernise its infrastructure. The project was supported by experts from Valorem Reply.
Pioneering digital transformation firm, Valorem Reply, is celebrating the success of its project at the University of Portsmouth.
A prioritised Microsoft Cloud Solutions Partner, the company – part of the Reply Group – focuses on transforming businesses into intelligent enterprises and helping non-profits achieve more with AI enabled, cloud native solutions, a strategic business outcome focus, and user-led design.
With 24,500 students and 4,600 staff relying on approximately 200 digital applications, the University of Portsmouth increasingly found it was in need of updating its technological foundations. Despite attempts to digitalise a number of processes, new integrations typically took between 18 to 24 months to complete.
This was in part caused by the fact the institution’s existing infrastructure had a number of critical issues, including multiple undocumented legacy systems with knowledge gaps due to staff turnover, and extremely slow development cycles. In a bid to fix this, the university partnered with Valorem Reply to replace its costly, under-utilised legacy system with Microsoft’s integration services, aiming to streamline its processes, modernise its approach, and build internal capabilities.
Building capacity
Dan Bass, a partner of Valorem Reply, explained, “The University of Portsmouth’s digital infrastructure is made up of more than 200 different applications supporting learning, teaching and business operations. It’s a complex ecosystem that needs robust integration capabilities to function effectively and to deliver services to the whole university community.”
Despite challenges in organisational culture and skills transition, however, across just two years the project successfully deployed nine production integrations across 28 interfaces, with 24 functional and non-functional deployments delivered to date in 2026. Integration development time has also significantly reduced from 18 months to between six and eight weeks, meeting the initial target of the project.
While the project is “still in progress”, according to Bass, with 40 more production integrations still to be developed, the consultants have helped to improve development and testing processes to create a foundation for more consistent and rapid delivery – while delivering cost benefits by moving away from the existing legacy platform. To that end, Bass added that the project has reinforced that “technical transformations are fundamentally about people, and empowering the team”, with knowledge building also having proven “critical to this success.”
Vicky Gosling, deputy director of digital solutions and delivery for the University of Portsmouth, concluded, “The ‘Nirvana’ of faster deployment will enable the university to be more responsive to changing needs and leverage the power of integrated data across our complex application landscape. The foundation we have built with Valorem Reply gives us the platform to genuinely transform how we serve our students and staff.”
