State College, PA: Schoolwires, Inc. offers one of the most powerful, yet easy to use, website management solutions for schools K through 12. It has developed a hosting program that enables districts to offer a robust online presence that allows better interaction between students, teachers, schools, and parents as well as the surrounding community. Schoolwires web hosting service is centrally-managed, cost effective, and secure.
Richard Stivers, Manager of Network and IT Services at Schoolwires, has been with the company since 2001 and has brought to its team nearly a decade of experience in network architecture development, implementation, and training. He was an integral member of the project team that designed, developed, and documented the Schoolwires Academic Portal core product. Schoolwires Academic Portal is the website management solution of choice for more than 3,000 schools and 2,000,000 million parents, students, and educators across the country.
"We partnered with the company that originally wrote the PAPowerPort and rewrote it for the K-12 market," said Stivers. "From that point, I was the person they trained to manage the original hosting environment. Schoolwires had a growth plan in place that was aggressive. The service level our clients expected could only have been met with a third party hosting company."
Stivers said they did an in-depth search and found that Expedient gave them a local presence that could meet their needs. "With Expedient, we know we have someone monitoring our environment 24/7/365. We also needed input on hosting technology, and have leveraged Expedient’s expertise on architecture to ensure that we have the right equipment and the correct network setup to allow our product to work most effectively."
Stivers said that Expedient gave them the tools to continue moving forward. "We could not have offered our services at the price point we wanted if we had to host it ourselves. We needed to have both high availability and room to grow.”
“Recently, we released a new product called Synergy – a digital file sharing system – which requires about two terabytes of network storage. Working with Expedient is going to allow us to package up that solution very effectively and gives us room to scale up to five terabytes. It will give each student a 100MB or 250MB of space where they can save files online, so it’s a service that requires quite a bit of bandwidth and support."
It is this flexibility and ability to easily scale up that has prompted Stivers and the Schoolwires team to expand its services with Expedient. "Because of our partnership, we have a totally managed and hosted solution right now. And, as we continue to grow and offer new products, we will continue to leverage our relationship with Expedient. The managed services they provide us result in huge benefits for districts and the communities they serve: 24/7/365 monitoring of servers and increased savings,” said Stivers.
About Schoolwires
Schoolwires delivers a complete portfolio of online products and services designed to meet the needs the nation’s K 12 schools and the students, parents and teachers that they serve. These solutions are designed to empower schools to improve communication and collaboration. For more information visit the company’s website at http://www.schoolwires.com or contact Barbara Ottervik at 814.689.1046, ext 341 or bottervik@schoolwires.com.
About Expedient
Expedient manages one of America’s largest all-Ethernet networks, delivering advanced internet, voice and managed services to commercial and government entities throughout the United States. Through the power of its carrier-class Ethernet IP network and class one data centers, Expedient provides innovative and cost-effective networking solutions engineered to meet even the most demanding business needs. Expedient is a proud member of the Continental Broadband family of commercial internet data service providers wholly owned by Landmark Communications. Privately owned Landmark Communications’ companies are a diverse group of award-winning publications and media outlets, including newspapers, television broadcasting, cable TV programming (The Weather Channel), and electronic publishing. To learn more about Expedient and Ethernet Anywhere, please log on to expedient.com, ethernetanywhere.com or call 866-276-2973, toll-free.
