Case Study: Fordham University achieves campus-wide data-driven decision-making and 200% BI cost reduction with Microsoft Azure

University empowers more decision makers with easy-to-use data analytics

Fordham University, a private Jesuit institution in New York, needed to give hundreds of administrators timely, trustworthy analytics to inform enrollment, budgeting, and student‑success decisions. Its legacy BI tools were expensive and limited to a few licensed users, forcing staff to produce hundreds of static reports or rely on manual Excel exports that created inconsistent “truths.” A four‑person data analytics team struggled to scale insights across roughly 1,000 administrators.

Rather than replace its rich SQL Server data warehouse, Fordham adopted Microsoft Azure services—Power BI for self‑service reporting plus Azure Machine Learning and R Server for predictive analytics—and moved parts of its infrastructure to the cloud. In three months it rolled out Power BI (initially to 50 admins), enabling shared dashboards and custom reports from a single source of data, accelerating time‑to‑value, improving data security and operational agility, enabling predictive insights, and substantially lowering BI costs while saving about 200 IT hours per year (≈20% efficiency gain).

Fordham University

Rashid Khan

Director of Analytics