BUSINESS SERVICES & FINANCIALS

What We Do

The OIT business service team budgets for and procures services that advance UC Merced computing capabilities, cybersecurity, and applications.

OIT Financial Resource Management

Information technology is expensive, and the drivers of change in IT are largely external. Campus needs, vendor changes, and the general tide of technological progress will wait for no IT group.


In many cases, OIT must act as a steward of information technology resources that enable and transform business processes and support teaching, learning and research. As such, we must be good stewards: choosing projects and products wisely, tracking our progress, and standing accountable for the work that we do.


Looking forward to 2018, OIT Business Service staff will be working toward the implementation of a Global Services Model. Designed to sustain campus operations and fund services used by the majority of the campus, this model will allow OIT to appropriately support recurring costs for things like the replacement of aging equipment, the purchase of new equipment, and software maintenance.

New Initiatives

OIT support for modernization of business processes—something that was identified as a priority in the campus change alignment map—resulted in over $200k in new costs for two major projects: CashNet, implemented for Business and Financial Services, which provides for automated and streamlined banking services, and Digital Business Services (DBS 2020), which was implemented to support paperless workflow and document management.

Over the course of 2017, we invested over $60k in 2017 to upgrade end of life equipment to support nearline storage. We also made several investments in UPS battery maintenance by taking on costs previously not budgeted by schools and facilities management. This investment ensures our back-up power capacity for key locations such as research computing assets located in S&E 1 and 2.

Investments in the UC Merced Next Generation Network (NGN) continued to impact operational costs as new hardware generates ongoing support and maintenance costs with each building upgrade.


Now in year 3 of the project, OIT spent $598,105 in FY 17 to support NGN implementations in addition to $311,398.00 allocated in FY 16 and FY 15. This cost will escalate significantly as 2020 buildings come online. In addition, we spent $219,430.00 on staff augmentation in support of NGN. We also hired new staff to support our Network and Voice Services team.

We also invested $51,000 toward software to support teaching, learning, and research with the purchase of Kaltura for video streaming and Matlab to support computational analysis and programming needs.

Recurring Costs

Recurring cost increases in FY 17 reflect operational expenses for new initiatives launched in FY 16, in addition to several multi-year renewals that came due in FY 17.


This year we combined the total costs for software licensing, support and maintenance into a single dollar figure, which is by far our largest expenditure.


In general, we assume that most recurring costs for software licenses, support and maintenance increase 1-2% per year, or are driven upwards due to increases in the size of our campus end user population.

Among our largest annual recurring costs:


  • $470,000 for software licensing, support and hosting of our Banner Student Information System and associated applications and services. This cost increases contractually each year by an annual 4% escalator
  • $229,000 for Oracle database licensing
  • $163,000 for classroom technology repairs and replacements
  • $160,000 for campus use of Microsoft products and associated support services
  • $101,000 for CATDrive file storage, hosted at UC Berkeley
  • $147,000 for academic applications, inclusive of $117,000 for CatCourses Learning Management System
  • $99,00 for CrashPlan (desktop back up for all faculty and staff)
  • $76,000 for infrastructure service licenses
  • $40,000 for hosting the UCMerced.edu web environment
  • $36,000 for Box.com storage
  • $35,000 for ServiceNow to manage service requests and incident management

Non-Recurring Costs

Our non-recurring costs for FY 17 total $364,000.


Those costs support 69 full-time employees (FTE) and include expenditures for equipment replacement, professional development and training on new technologies and vendor upgrades.


Our non-recurring expenses also include costs for office supplies and expenses, intercampus travel, business meetings and staff incentives.

Strengthening Relationships

During 2017, OIT Business Service unit made a sustained effort to build and strengthen relationships with major vendors during 2017.


This effort helped us ensure that the department and the campus continue to receive stellar service in support of our investments. By holding vendors to higher expectations, we were able to realize $70,000 in total savings across two vendors—a great savings for our budget!


Transparent Stewardship

As stewards of the University of California Merced, The Office of Information Technology is dedicated to creating transparency concerning our expenditures.


Should you require more information than is included above, please contact OIT Financial Supervisor Ronnie Vasquez at RVasquez28@ucmerced.edu.