Case Study: WA Department of Education and Training (WA DET) centralizes infrastructure and cuts costs with Actian Ingres

Department of Education and Training in Western Australia Makes the Grade with Actian and Red Hat

The Western Australia Department of Education and Training (WA DET) supports 11 colleges, about 8,000 staff and manages over 1 million student records, processing roughly 120,000 students a year. Faced with a costly, fragmented Unix-based back-end across regional sites, WA DET needed to centralize operations and move away from proprietary systems without disrupting its complex, high‑use applications.

WA DET migrated to Actian Ingres running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux on commodity servers and consolidated into a single data center. Using the Ingres .NET connector and specialist support, the transition required minimal front‑end changes and caused no end‑user interruptions; it eliminated expensive vendor support contracts, improved reliability and performance, consolidated servers (five physical servers hosting 11 Ingres databases and 31 supporting instances), and enabled integration with Microsoft CRM and SharePoint to streamline training delivery and self‑service.

WA DET

Darren Pointer

Coordinator of Technology Systems