We present AI-VERDE, a unified LLM-as-a-platform service designed to facilitate seamless integration of commercial, cloud-hosted, and on-premise open LLMs in academic settings. AI-VERDE streamlines access management for instructional and research groups by providing features such as robust access control, privacy-preserving mechanisms, native Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) support, budget management for third-party LLM services, and both a conversational web interface and API access. In a pilot deployment at a large public university, AI-VERDE demonstrated significant engagement across diverse educational and research groups, enabling activities that would typically require substantial budgets for commercial LLM services with limited user and team management capabilities. To the best of our knowledge, AI-Verde is the first platform to address both academic and research needs for LLMs within an higher education institutional framework.