University of Sheffield is big, but £30m stills sounds like a lot to spend on a student management system. I believe the SITS system is written in uniface - "You're building all these views and processes and you get all of the problems that you would do with conventional software development, [however] you just don't have any of the standard tooling that makes your life easier while you're doing it".

"Configurable, with no code" ...

Once something passes some level of complexity (mystic hand wave) its configuration is code.