07 June 2017

The university hopes that by understanding the end-user experience it will be able to provide a superior IT service to its student community.

The University of Derby (UoD) has selected Nexthink to improve the visibility of its IT environment. 

UoD gained university status in 1992 and now serves more than 30,000 students via its sites in Derby, Buxton and online. 

Over the past five years, it has invested more than £100m in its technology infrastructure and now has around 5,000 endpoints.

These include user workstations and 1,500-2,000 mobile devices, spread across three primary sites and six satellite locations.

As well as claiming to offer “first-class” campus facilities”, UoD says its infrastructure also enables students to participate in programmes that are provided entirely online or via blended learning. 

With enrolment numbers increasing each year, it has a pressing need to efficiently support students and faculties by quickly accessing relevant contextual endpoint and end-user data.

Nexthink says its end-user experience management system proactively monitors UoD’s entire IT infrastructure and reports on important end-user related events, such as performance issues, failures, crashes and security issues.

The company says its real-time and historical record of the usage and performance of services will provide unique visualisations and actionable insights to the university’s IT team so that they can enhance the services provided to users.

The deployment was carried out in partnership with student technology specialist Software2. Its CEO and co-founder Tony Austwick says: “Nexthink enables the university to concentrate on all the devices connected to [its] infrastructure. By looking beyond backend operations to the actual impact on end-users, the university can see exactly how the environment is performing, where any gaps are, and where further improvements are needed.”