The UCISA26 Leadership Summit in Liverpool was a full one for the Amos team – deep conversation at the stand about integration challenges, legacy systems, and what good looks like in higher education technology. By early evening day 2, the laptops were closed, the stand was packed down, and we made our way to Liverpool Cathedral for the UCISA Awards 2026 night.
Liverpool Cathedral is quite a setting for any occasion, and the UCISA Awards night did not disappoint. The room was full of familiar faces from across the higher education technology sector – the kind of people who understand the work, the challenges, and what it really takes to deliver in this environment.
When the Outstanding Corporate Member category was called and Amos was announced as the winner, it was one of those moments that takes a second to land. We are a small team. We do focused, specific work with institutions who trust us to get it right. To be recognised for that, by peers who understand exactly what the work involves, meant a great deal.
The nomination came from our long-standing partner, the University for the Creative Arts (UCA). Being nominated by an institution we work alongside every day means the recognition is rooted in the reality of how we work, not just how we present ourselves.
Our Head of Operations, Derek Traynor, shared what the award means to Amos:
“Winning this award means a great deal to the whole team, but what matters most is that it came from UCA. The real measure of how we work is what our partners say about us – and to be recognised in this way, for work that genuinely moved the needle for their institution, is something we’re very proud of. It also reflects what we believe good partnership in higher education looks like: honest conversations, shared accountability, and outcomes that last beyond go-live.”
At the heart of the nomination is a transformation project that tells a familiar story for many HEIs: a portfolio of legacy integrations accumulating technical debt, placing quiet but persistent pressure on system resilience, data quality, and the teams responsible for keeping everything running.
Working closely with UCA, Amos modernised ten critical legacy integrations, replacing them with Amos Connect – an API-driven, cloud-ready integration platform built specifically for the demands of higher education. The results were tangible: improved system resilience, reduced downtime, stronger data quality, and a significantly simpler maintenance landscape for UCA’s service teams going forward. The project showed what Amos does best: taking complex, business-critical integration problems and making them simpler, more resilient, and easier for institutions to manage over time.
What UCA described in their nomination was not just a technology upgrade, but a working relationship defined by transparency, genuine consultation, and a commitment to getting the outcome right – not just the delivery signed off.
One of the things that strikes us about the UCA project is how recognisable the challenge will be to technology and registry teams across the sector. Technical debt in integration architecture is not a UCA-specific problem – it is endemic to higher education, where systems accumulate over decades and the cost of modernisation has historically seemed prohibitive.
The approach Amos took at UCA – structured, consultative, delivered through Integration as a Service rather than a one-off project – is precisely the model we bring to every institution we work with. It is replicable, and it works.
Congratulations to the UCISA team for continuing to shine a light on partnerships that deliver real value to the sector. And our sincere thanks to UCA – this one belongs to both of us.
If your institution is navigating similar integration challenges, we would be glad to talk. Get in touch at hello@amos.ie.
