AIP – ETH’s digital hub picks up speed
AIP here, AIP there – the term is cropping up in more and more projects and discussions. But what is actually behind the Application Integration Platform (AIP)? And above all: what does it actually offer us?
What is the AIP?
ETH’s digital requirements are growing rapidly – new projects such as Digital Campus and cloud-based services are constantly emerging. Without a centralised, intelligent integration platform, each project would have to build its own interfaces to existing systems. This leads to greater complexity and higher costs, and it exacerbates technical debt. The AIP solves this problem: it creates a foundation that can be built once and reused multiple times.
The AIP is becoming the central data hub of ETH Zurich. Instead of countless direct connections between individual systems, in future there will be an intelligent hub that orchestrates everything – both on site and in the cloud. The result: less complexity, higher speed, better data quality.
Figuratively speaking, the AIP is the modern telephone exchange of ETH IT: invisible to users, but crucial for ensuring that all calls arrive at the right place at the right time.
What you can use the AIP for
Three specific examples show possible applications:
- Asynchronous communication for more stability: when students enrol in academyFIVE – ETH’s future campus management system – the system publishes an event. The AIP distributes this information to IAM, SAP and all other interested systems – in such a way that each system functions independently of the others. If a system is down in the short term, it receives the information later. This decoupling ensures significantly more stability in the overall system landscape.
- Secure migration of large amounts of data: when moving several thousand student profiles from the old education platform to Digital Campus, the AIP ensures that data is extracted cleanly, converted into a standardised format, and loaded without losses.
- Synchronised communication for immediate responses: before a new person is created in academyFIVE, the system makes a direct enquiry via the AIP: does this person already exist somewhere at ETH? The answer comes back immediately – synchronised, in real time. This avoids duplicate creations and massively improves data quality.
Current progress
The AIP is no longer a vision of the future – it is taking shape:
- The Steering Committee approved the program at the end of October 2025 (PgM200) and thus gave the green light for the implementation phase.
- The technical breakthrough with Digital Campus has been successful: academyFIVE can be integrated into the ETH system landscape via the AIP.
- New prospects: other projects are interested in the AIP. The Architecture Competence Center (ACC) has also stipulated that future integration projects must use the AIP – making it a binding standard.
What this means
The AIP creates a reusable platform that works not only for Digital Campus, but for all future integration projects at ETH. Something that is built once can be used multiple times – this saves on time, costs and stress.
For anyone developing new services or modernising existing ones: check at an early stage whether the AIP will play a key role in your integration projects. The AIP Office is available for questions and coordination: aip-office@ethz.ch
The AIP works in the background – so that everything runs smoothly in the foreground at ETH.
Contact
Michael Werner, Project Manager IT Services at ETH Zurich (ITS CCR)
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