ET Talk: Driving UT Forward — Foundational Technologies

Two foundations, one mission

Episode 8 picks up the thread Cole and Graham Chapman started a week earlier in Episode 7 — and pushes it one layer down. Dave Moss leads ET's Campus Solutions team, which runs the foundational technology that essentially everything else at UT depends on. Vinod Shodavaram, who reports to Dave, runs the infrastructure on which those foundations sit. Recorded back in the studio in the Union Underground, the conversation is two operators talking about what it actually takes to keep the lights on for a 75,000-person institution.

The breadth of Campus Solutions is wider than most of campus realizes. Identity and access management. Compute, storage, and database. Cloud platforms and container management. Application deployment. Direct support of the mainframe. By Dave's count, somewhere around eighty to eighty-five distinct services sit inside the team's portfolio — most of them invisible to the people who use them every day.

The pace of campus

Dave's framing for the work is honest about the constraint: "We are trying to drive technology forward, but at times we can only move as quick as the pace of campus." Modernization at UT happens in half-steps because the people on the other side of the change have built their work around what already exists. The team's job, as Dave describes it, is to keep moving them in the right direction without breaking the operations they depend on.

He returns several times to a hard-earned lesson: customers in higher ed have very long memories. About ten years ago, UT made an early move to migrate email to the cloud. The technology was not as robust as it needed to be, and the experience was bad enough to sour the campus on cloud migration for years afterward. Even now, when the service has matured into something rock-solid that nobody thinks twice about, Dave still hears "we tried that fifteen years ago and it didn't work." Trust, once spent, is not cheap to rebuild.

The flip side is the scale of what already works. Vinod notes that the mainframe — the system everybody loves to call legacy — is handling almost two billion database calls per day, and traffic was up six percent over the previous year. The student system still runs on it, and the cloud student-system market still cannot match what UT does today. "Stability," Dave says, "is the bedrock of everything we do."

• About 10 years ago: a difficult email-to-cloud migration soured campus on cloud moves for years
• The mainframe handles roughly 2 billion database calls per day, up 6% year over year
• Customer long memories are a real constraint on modernization — every change carries the weight of every prior one

From under-the-desk servers to the cloud

Vinod has been at UT for thirteen years. Dave for almost eighteen. Together they walk Cole through the long arc of how campus computing got to where it is — a story that compresses several technology generations into one conversation. There was a moment, not that long ago, when individual buildings still kept physical servers under desks. The first move was simply consolidating those into a real data center. The next was virtualization. The next was the cloud. And throughout, both ends of that journey carried the same friction: the people whose work depended on the existing way of doing things were never quite ready to leap.

Vinod's framing is that the leaps look like plateaus from the inside — long stretches where everyone learns to operate in the new model before the next jump becomes possible. Dave still hears the case against off-prem regularly. The team's posture has been to keep nudging, manage expectations carefully, and show up with the operational discipline that makes the next move plausible.

Five nines as the platform

The metaphor Dave reaches for is the electricity company. Nobody should have to think about logging in with their EID, completing a Duo prompt, sending an email, or signing a document. The light comes on. Behind that simplicity sits real engineering at scale. The university processed roughly 110 million authentications in the past year, with EID protecting more than a thousand distinct services. Identity is the front door for every system the team onboards.

Cole reflects on what that has meant for him as CIO. The fact that the foundation has been quietly built and re-built over the past decade is what gives him the credibility to walk into rooms and promise what comes next. "You're going to trust us to deliver what's next, because all of our folks do this every single day." Five nines is not a brag in this conversation. It is the platform the next conversation gets to stand on.

Long-tenured, AI-forward

One of the most striking observations in the episode runs against the cliché about long-tenured engineers and new tools. When AI assistance arrived inside Campus Solutions, the people who lined up first were not the newest hires. They were the staff with the longest tenure — including team members marking forty-year anniversaries — who immediately wanted access. Their rationale was practical. They had been busy for forty years. Anything that could offload routine work and create room for modernization was, to use Dave's word, attractive.

That energy is showing up in the team's recent work. ID card modernization collapsed a multi-screen, multi-click process into a single screen and a couple of clicks. Digital ID is now in active design — Campus Solutions is doing the technical architecture and integration work behind the scenes with partners across campus. As Dave puts it, the team is able to address technical debt and improve the front-end experience in the same pass.

From IT for IT to IT for everyone

The conversation's most provocative section is about who the customer actually is now. Vinod observes that Campus Solutions has historically built for the distributed IT model — its primary interface has been other IT staff, not end users. AI is collapsing that. The end user is becoming the direct customer. A faculty member or a student with a laptop and the right tools can now generate things that used to require a ticket and a queue.

Cole tells a story from a recent Teams call: he used Claude Code on a $499 MacBook Neo to do something he had never done before with GitHub, and Vinod's team watched, in real time, as the assistant wrote forty thousand lines of code, cleaned itself up, and replicated something close to six years of the team's automation work in roughly an hour. What followed was not anxiety about being made redundant. It was the realization that the team's role shifts — toward the role-based data access, deployment guardrails, and shared infrastructure that turn 75,000 campus members into safe, productive builders.

Cole calls the destination a "self-healing campus." An end user with experience, knowledge, and a need should not have to file a ticket — they need data access, a place to stage a project, single sign-on, and a way to share what they make. Dave and Vinod describe how the team's recent partnerships position them to deliver that: the AI Studio with Mario Guerra and Cody, and an unusually AI-forward CISO in Cam Beasley, who Cole notes rarely says no — only "yes, but not the way you're describing it."

• ID card modernization: from multiple screens and clicks to a single screen and a couple of clicks
• Digital ID work in flight, with Campus Solutions handling architecture and partner integrations
• Vision: ET as enabler — role-based data access, deployment guardrails, shared services that let 75,000 campus members build safely

Solutions in the name

When Enterprise Technology was reorganized, almost every group was renamed. Campus Solutions was not. Dave appreciates why: it is the descriptive label people on campus already used. If you have something to solve, this is the team you call.

The episode closes with a small but illustrative example. The MyUT app's free-food feature lets verified campus events broadcast leftover food to students nearby — and just days before the recording, a meeting at ET ended with one button push and a group of students arriving five minutes later to pick up what was left. It is a technology solution to a real-world problem the team takes seriously: food insecurity is still part of the student experience at UT, exactly as it was when Dave was a student many years ago. "All gas, no brakes," Cole says, borrowing the phrase from athletics. That, he and Dave agree, is what the work inside Enterprise Technology feels like right now.