Sometimes, the best technology is the technology people don’t notice.
Like a highway handling the weight of daily drivers, SPIRE quietly carries the demands of campus life. When everything runs smoothly, it’s just a fixture in the background. But when there’s a pothole or a traffic jam, it’s felt.
This academic year, SPIRE has supported critical campus operations reliably, even during high-demand times like course registration. Thanks to recent upgrades and close coordination across IT teams, students were able to register for classes and access their portals without interruption.
That outcome wasn’t accidental: It’s from months of effort by UMass IT teams to strengthen SPIRE’s infrastructure and performance for greater stability, accessibility, and responsiveness to campus needs.
Supporting a system the campus depends on
SPIRE is the backbone of student life at UMass Amherst. It’s where students register for classes, pay tuition, request housing, and manage financial aid; likewise, faculty and staff rely on it for essential administrative tasks and for crucial campus support.
It’s also a legacy system, meaning it’s older and needs regular updates to function well. With this in mind, UMass IT teams have spent the last 18 months focused on making SPIRE more resilient and efficient. That included improving its reliability during peak traffic times, upgrading infrastructure, automating key processes, and catching potential issues before they cause disruptions. The outcome has been significant.
“Since we've modernized our technologies and made them much more robust, big crashes are no longer happening,” says Scotia Roopnarine, Director of Data Engineering at UMass IT. “We are getting through the first day of registration with nothing wrong.”
A thoughtful, long-term approach to stability
SPIRE’s recent improvements didn’t happen overnight, and they weren’t the result of any single fix. UMass IT teams have taken a long-term approach to modernization, grounded in continuous feedback and careful coordination across teams.
These results of this approach were seen during Spring 2025 registration, there were no incident reports, no help desk phone calls, and no SPIRE support tickets. Students were able to complete registration without issue, and business units across campus, including registration, billing, financial aid, and admissions, also experienced better functionality from SPIRE.
“The system has been so much more reliable,” said Tom Paret, director of IT enrollment management.
Jill Moulton from the Office of the Bursar agrees that the improvements are showing up in daily use.
“When I searched for students’ IDs…SPIRE would take a lot of time to load the results in the past, but now it shows a truncated list,” she says. “I appreciate the time it saves.”
Even SPIRE upgrades have become invisible to users across departments.
"We just completed our seventh successful upgrade,” says Roopnarine. “I asked the campus business leads, ‘How did it go?’ And they said, ‘We didn’t even know it happened.’"
Spring Break Transformation
One of the most significant upgrades came over spring break, when IT staff successfully moved SPIRE’s application servers from Windows to Linux — a more stable and flexible operating system. The migration helps ensure SPIRE can run more reliably and be maintained more efficiently over time.
The transition was no small feat. It required close coordination between development, infrastructure, and database teams. Led by Ted Atkinson, associate director of administrative applications, the project brought together database administrators, SPIRE developers, and system administrators across UMass IT. It was completed over a single weekend with no reported disruptions.
Besides infrastructure changes, the SPIRE team also introduced real-time monitoring tools to detect and resolve potential issues before they affect users, and improved automation and structured release management to reduce downtime during updates. The result of these combined efforts is starting to show, both in system performance and user experience.
What’s next for UMass IT systems?
While SPIRE’s recent success is cause for celebration, it’s not the final destination.
"There’s more work to be done. I think we've achieved the goals of stabilization,” says Roopnarine. “The next one is to make sure we keep it this way. That means to continue training, make sure that we continue to pay attention to processes, and use the same philosophy for our next projects.”