c and the Berklee College of Music announced an agreement to merge. At the merger, Berklee's name became simply Berklee and the Conservatory was renamed the Boston Conservatory at Berklee. Berklee is a global university with a campus in Valencia and programs internationally including in Canada, China, India, and Latin America. Although the Boston locations www.TechnicalPDF.com are a few blocks from each other in downtown Boston, the close proximity of the Boston Conservatory to Berklee did not preclude disparities in hardware and software. Bob Xavier, former IT Directory of the Boston Conservatory, was appointed the IT Director for the merged entity. Xavier's goal was to simplify and streamline the infrastructure as key elements in ensuring uptime. The secondary goal was to make technology investments that promote the institution's business values. Per Xavier, an immediate need was to put in place consistent processes to manage change and implementation, and to develop compatible software applications. According to Xavier, "We are being strangled by the weight of supporting SO many incompatible systems and applications." For example, Berklee and the Boston Conservatory had incompatible student systems. Berklee had a student system called Colleague, and the Conservatory had PowerCampus Student. Student systems are software packages used to manage the majority of tasks around students. These include admissions, financial aid records, human resources, tuition bills, and course registrations. According to IT director Bob Xavier, the number one priority for Berklee is the ability to be nimble SO that the University can keep up with technological changes and requirements. Four years before the merger, the Boston Conservatory made a strategic decision to push all applications and processes to the cloud or to hosting centers. They wanted to "get out of the data center business." The rationale is that it's easier to be nimble and flexible without the burden of upgrading hardware in data centers when technology inevitably 