Press release

SPIE draws on all its hybrid cloud expertise to double performance of ICAM engineering school's digital campus

Published on 17 March 2025

Malakoff, 18 March 2025 – SPIE ICS, a French digital services company (DSC) and subsidiary of SPIE, the independent European leader in multi-technical services in the areas of energy and communications, has designed a new-generation virtual campus for the seven French sites of the ICAM engineering school. Thanks to this large-scale transformation, the school is able to provide its 4,500 students and academic personnel with a platform offering enhanced performance and an improved user experience, while reducing its carbon footprint. 

Back in 2018, SPIE ICS rolled out a fully virtual workspace based on a virtual desktop infrastructure at ICAM. SPIE ICS then helped the engineering school to accelerate the adoption of this workspace during the lockdown of March 2020. Building on this successful partnership, ICAM asked SPIE ICS to design a new digital campus structured around three strategic axes, which was rolled out at the start of the 2024 academic year. 

 

1/ A new-generation platform offering an optimal user experience 

SPIE ICS has rolled out a new version of its infrastructure, the "ICAM Cloud Platform", which provides students with a virtual workspace that they can access from any device. This new platform incorporates the latest technology from Citrix, Nutanix and Nvidia and improves the user experience by offering greater reliability, speed and performance. It boasts a seamless interface and provides quick access to educational resources, thus meeting the needs of a diverse and increasingly mobile student population that has adopted new ways of working. 

SPIE ICS orchestrated the complete migration of the infrastructure to a single data center, the eco-responsible1 design of which​​ has allowed ICAM to reduce the environmental impact of this infrastructure by almost 75%. 

Lastly, this new Cloud platform significantly reduces the workload of ICAM's IT team as it streamlines administration and maintenance. 

 

2/ A single server and storage infrastructure for the seven school sites 

SPIE ICS also updated and automated all of the technical infrastructure on the seven ICAM sites in France. The use of Nutanix clusters2 made it possible to unify and harmonise server and storage management across the sites: automating the update process and optimising maintenance have brought about significant reductions in the number of manual tasks to be completed and in admin time. 

 

3/ Centralised, managed support services for greater efficiency 

SPIE ICS now hosts all of ICAM's support services, such as accounting, payroll management etc., and performs IT management in this regard. This centralisation not only guarantees optimal availability of critical services but also allows ICAM's IT teams to refocus their efforts on projects with greater added value, no longer held back by the burden of day-to-day administrative management. 

Initiated in late 2023 and rolled out at the start of the 2024 academic year, this new digital campus doubled the performance of the previous platform. It is testament to the ability of the SPIE ICS teams to manage complex, multi-site infrastructure transformations with a tight schedule. 

"We managed to carry out these three projects simultaneously by providing a multi-expertise offering combining VDI3, infrastructure, automation and cyber security" 

explains Benjamin Roudaut, Sales Engineer at SPIE ICS.

“This project showcases our ability to support higher education institutions in their digital transformation while meeting performance, sustainability and operational excellence demands."

"Having contributed to transforming our educational practices by creating a fully virtual workspace, SPIE ICS was able to bring to life our vision of a new state-of-the-art digital campus that could meet the ever-changing needs of our 4,500 students. This long-term collaboration will enable us to confidently support our expansion and the opening of new sites." 

adds Gwenola Kerglonou, IT systems manager at ICAM.

 

 

 

1 The host data center is certified to Tier IV and delivers excellent energy and environmental performance

2 A Nutanix cluster is a hyper-converged infrastructure that brings together computation, storage and virtualisation in a single software platform, which in turn simplifies resource management and upscaling.

3 Virtual Desktop Infrastructure

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