IBM, on Wednesday, has announced that Extramarks has selected SoftLayer to expand and grow its educational content business. Using SoftLayer’s cloud platform, Extramarks aims to significantly improve the delivery of media rich, critical educational content to thousands of K-12 students across 250 locations in India.
 
Extramarks is a new age education solutions enterprise and SoftLayer is an IBM company.
 
“Extramarks has presence in 250 cities and we required an IT environment to scale up adequately and efficiently. Extramarks has entered into a three-year partnership with SoftLayer for the complete infrastructure services required for Extramarks Live. We are excited with the prospects of how SoftLayer will enhance our student experience to consume content,” said Atul Kulshrestha, Chairman, Extramarks.
 
“Delivering personalized educational content in visual form will be the future for education in India. IBM is helping companies drive this change through our robust cloud infrastructure. We have enabled Extramarks address the growing requirements of its student constituency while at the same time reducing their overall IT services costs,” said Ganesh Margabandhu, General Manager, Global Technology Services, IBM India South Asia.

                                                 
 
In a three-year engagement, Extramarks has opted to use SoftLayer for its Extramarks Live, an e-tutorial platform that offers a wide range of content for different national and state level curriculum. The program currently has 700,000 students enrolled and enables users to connect with the learning material at their own convenience. The material is customized to facilitate learning as per a student’s capability.
 
With SoftLayer delivering this key offering, students will have a superior digital learning experience.  . The cloud based platform also ensures that there is low tolerance for latency, which can hugely affect the company’s overall student subscriptions. SoftLayer will bring in the required amount of robustness and flexibility to ensure a seamless delivery of all learning experiences under Extramarks Live.
 
Given the online model, media rich content, distributed delivery locations and rapid growth of business, Extramarks required an IT infrastructure that would help the company provide a seamless and error free learning environment to its students. SoftLayer, which offers a highly secure, reliable, and agile cloud platform, provided the best option for Extramarks to achieve the required efficiencies in delivery and business growth. SoftLayer fulfilled the requirement by providing high performance servers on demand, along with required speed to provide the educational content in real time.
 
In a short period since its launch in 2009, Extramarks products are widely used by prestigious institutions and students across India to supplement and provide an enriching learning experience focused on the all-round development of the child. Specialized digital content developed by Extramarks and delivered through technology enabled classrooms are used by teachers to provide a visually rich medium of instruction. In addition to in-school curriculum support, Extramarks also provides after school tutorial support via the Internet.
 
In addition to SoftLayer’s strong intellectual property and technology, it uniquely helps deliver mass customization to cloud computing and offers significantly more choice and variability when it comes to cloud, without compromising deployment speed.