IBM × IAU

A manual job that couldn’t scale — for anyone

Getting data out of WHED was a manual job. Every client request meant someone extracting the data by hand and generating an Excel file. IAU had moved off the old printed volumes to a custom web platform in 2016, but a person was still in the loop for every request — including IBM’s own team, who relied on WHED data for their education-sector partnership work and were absorbing the delay themselves.

At the same time, more organisations wanted programmatic access — an API — rather than emailed spreadsheets. And the whole thing ran on a virtual machine costing $12,000 a year, real money for a non-profit on a tight budget. For 27,000+ institutions, and for a key partner like IBM feeling the friction first-hand, the manual model had run out of road.

One API, sponsored by IBM, built in 12 weeks

IBM commissioned and funded the project through its Corporate Social Responsibility programme, engaging TDP to run a 12-week build with a team of four, working alongside both IBM and IAU. We rebuilt access around a REST API — cloud-native on Azure and aligned with IAU’s existing Microsoft 365 setup — replacing the manual Excel extractions.

It’s not a single endpoint but a growing set, with tiered, role-based access so each client gets the right level of data, and endpoints tailored to specific needs — including a dedicated frontend built for IBM’s own validation workflow. We built on Azure App Service to keep it simple to run and ready to scale.

And we didn’t hand back a black box. With the admin tooling and patterns we put in place, IAU’s own team can now build, ship and manage new endpoints themselves — so the platform keeps growing long after IBM’s sponsorship kicked it off.

What changed

• Manual Excel extractions are gone — regular requests are served by the API, not a person.
• Access is 24/7 and automated, instead of tied to office hours.
• The legacy $12,000-a-year VM is replaced with modern, scalable cloud.
• 27,000+ institutions are now programmatically accessible worldwide.

IBM: from days to minutes

IBM is one of WHED’s most demanding users, drawing on the database for its education-sector partnership work. Before the API, a team of three spent three to five days on every request — pulling the data, verifying it, and emailing it back by hand. It was slow enough that a full day’s work wouldn’t clear the queue.

We built IBM a dedicated frontend on top of the new API. That same team now runs the same checks in minutes, with an estimated 2.5 hours saved a day. The work carried enough internal weight that it was demoed to IBM’s VP of Corporate Social Responsibility, who reports directly to the IBM CEO.

Notion builds on the database too. With a real API in place, IAU can serve education and SaaS platforms like these directly — not one spreadsheet at a time.

One sponsorship, four kinds of impact

For IBM: a validation workload that ate three to five days per request now takes minutes — time an already-stretched team gets back every week. The build was visible enough internally to be demoed to IBM’s VP of Corporate Social Responsibility, whose own reporting line runs to the IBM CEO — a signal of how seriously the business took a project that, on paper, was about someone else’s database.

For IAU: the model changes the non-profit’s economics entirely. The API now brings in six figures a year in sustainable funding — the difference between giving data away by hand and running a platform that pays for itself and its mission. And it’s a launchpad: we left IAU with a self-sufficient team and a modular platform, so they can stand up new endpoints and propositions on their own.

For the wider ecosystem: 27,000+ institutions are now programmatically accessible, which compounds well beyond IBM and IAU. Recruitment and HR tools can auto-verify degrees instead of chasing paperwork. Universities and platforms — Notion already among them — get faster, more reliable credential checks for students. Government and accreditation bodies can integrate university data directly into their own systems. And researchers get bulk access that simply didn’t exist before.

For IBM’s CSR story: it’s a clean example of corporate technology-for-good — a global enterprise funding infrastructure a non-profit could never have resourced alone, while directly solving its own team’s problem in the process. Sponsor and beneficiary, aligned in one build.