Blackboard Opens Second European Data Centre to Support Increased Demand for Hosting from Colleges & Universities

Post by Blackboard Inc.

February 18, 2009 – Blackboard Inc. (NASDAQ: BBBB), a global leader in education technologies, right now announced the opening of its second information centre in Amsterdam, reinforcing the Company’s commitment to supporting the growing number of European institutions that have turned to Blackboard to host and manage their learning environments.

Blackboard’s two European data centres now offer hosting services to much more than 50 institutions across the continent. Glasgow Caledonian University and the University of Birmingham have both recently established new hosting agreements with Blackboard. In addition, Leiden University in the Netherlands and The University of Manchester have recently extended their hosting agreements.

With the increasing monetary and staffing limitations in the education, corporate and government industries, managed hosting has become an increasingly useful price saving alternative. And as learning management systems play a much more important role in supporting student success, a growing number of institutions have sought solutions to assist manage the day-to-day administration of their understanding environments, allowing them to focus far more on teaching and studying and much less on technologies.

“We rely on the Blackboard’s hosting to deliver a big scale virtual learning answer to our students, and believe that our efforts will benefit greatly from Blackboard’s new European information centre,” said Sarah Morgan, Strategic Projects Manager at The University of Manchester. “Our campus has witnessed a growing number of students who choose to combine their academic study with employment, and this means that our e-understanding offering should offer students with reliable, robust, real time access to their tutors, course material and campus wide learning resources.”

Together, Blackboard operates a total of six data centres in the United States, the Netherlands and Australia that support e-studying applications for more than 600 clients in the education, corporate and government fields worldwide. Overall, Blackboard guarantees a 99.7 percent uptime rate, though the firm has truly achieved a 99.9 percent over the last year across all information centres.

“The opening of a second European data centre was essential to meeting the increasing demand we are seeing from European institutions,” said Harry Choi, Vice President of Blackboard Managed HostingSM. “Institutions require dependable, secure, high performance infrastructure to support their increasingly complicated virtual studying environments. Several are discovering that managed hosting is an essential ingredient in their efforts to drive student and institutional success.”

Blackboard Managed Hosting supports 6 million active users, more than 3.5 million course websites and a lot more than 350 million World wide web hits a day in the course of peak activity. Collectively, far more than 2,000 servers are managed every day which monitor over 18,000 services each and every few minutes, including a broad range of Blackboard software installations and third party services supported by Blackboard Managed Hosting.

Staffed around the clock and throughout the year, Blackboard Managed Hosting guards against threats to physical and information security, natural disasters and network outages of all kinds, providing highly reliable, secure and cost powerful hosting environments for education, corporate and government clients.

For more info about Blackboard Managed Hosting, please go to http://blackboard.com/Support/Services/Managed-Hosting.aspx.

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