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Affordable housing developer Enterprise Community Partners has embarked on a four-year IT transformation that places cloud computing at its heart

When Pradip Sitaram became CIO of US-based non-profit social housing concern Enterprise Community Partners last year, he inherited an IT estate that needed to be entirely modernised – from the desktop to the data centre.

The organisation’s application stack was in an especially bad way, Sitaram recalls. “One of the first things I did was an assessment of all the applications we had,” he says. “We discovered over 80 applications and databases, which is a lot for a company with 550 employees.

“Some of the systems were tightly integrated, so changing one of them would break all the applications it was connected to,” he says. “But others weren’t integrated at all, which meant someone was entering the data by hand. That meant we had multiple versions of the truth.”

Just as Sitaram joined, the organisation was preparing to embark on an integration project that he felt was going to be expensive, risky and drawn-out. He therefore instigated an alternative, cloud-based project, that took one tenth of the investment and one tenth of the time.

Sitaram has used the success of that project, and the money that he saved, to justify a four-year, $40 million IT transformation strategy, with cloud computing as its centrepiece. The plan is to replace every system with a cloud-based alternative “unless there is a very good reason not to”, he says.

The transformational strategy has called for renewed focus on integration and it has accelerated the pace of software development, Sitaram says. It has also brought a new organisational culture to the IT department that not everyone could adjust to.

A huge win

Enterprise Community Partners funds affordable housing projects by connecting property developers to investors, who receive tax breaks in return for their investment. It operates 1,600 properties around the US, each of which house multiple families.

“Because our properties are funded through tax credits, our contractual obligations are very stringent and our reporting requirements are complex,” explains Sitaram. “Each property sends us weekly, monthly and quarterly reports, so we have thousands of reports flowing in every week.”

Historically, each of these reports would be entered into four separate systems, including the ERP database and the tax analysis and forecasting system. The company had identified this time-consuming process as ripe for modernisation before Sitaram joined, and was evaluating a proposal to implement an integration platform based on Microsoft’s BizTalk software.

“The proposal was for $800,000 and nine months,” Sitaram recalls. “And that was just for phase one, which implied that phases two and three would soon follow.”

This struck Sitaram as excessive, and as the new CIO he did not want to be responsible for a project that went over its budget. “To be honest, it scared me to death.”

Sitaram therefore suggested that the organisation’s lead developer evaluate alternative data integration platforms that could be deployed in the cloud, including Pervasive, Adeptia, CastIron and Boomi, an ‘integration platform as a service’ start-up that was acquired by Dell last year.

“Long story short, he said, ‘I like this Boomi thing, I’d like to give it a shot,’” Sitaram says. “He was able to train himself with Boomi and build the necessary integration, all in about four weeks. And because it was cloud-based, my initial cost exposure was just $1,500. If I had gone with the alternative, I would have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on people and licences just to get started. This was a huge win for us.”

Even so, in terms of Enterprise’s IT issues, it was just the tip of the iceberg. “The overwhelming sentiment towards our IT systems was that they were in the way, not there to help,” Sitaram says. “And because they were in the way, people didn’t want to use them, so they were not being used consistently.”

Sitaram decided that drastic change was required: “I looked at the rest of our systems and realised that we needed to leverage the cloud in a big way.”

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