LearningStation, Inc., a provider of online educational tools for students and teachers, designs and provides online educational testing, educational portals, websites, reference materials and instructional content to schools and states across the nation. The company's primary market is the 'institutional'industry, states and municipalities with students in grades K-12. LearningStation was gearing up to serve the home education market, and debuted in January '07 a service that will enable students to prepare for state and local tests, e.g. the MCAS, to take practice tests on a pay-per-click basis online.

The business, launched in 1999, began when CEO Jim Kirchner and his partner, who ran a networking business, put a local-area network in for a school. The lack of on-site technical expertise at the school led the partners to see the larger opportunity: create a service bureau business targeted at the unique challenges of the K-12 educational environment.

Adopting the application service provider (ASP) model prevalent in the late 1990s, Kirchner and company created a broad suite of services for the K-12 market, offering to build, and manage, LAN-based, hosted and managed environments complete with content, software and servers. The New York City schools, an early customer, benefited from LearningStation's ability to provide comprehensive services at a fraction of the cost the school district would have had to pay to manage the effort in-house. The State of Arizona followed soon after. LearningStation installed networks, computing environments, an educational portal and content, saving Arizona an estimated 80 percent in direct costs over the four-year contract. LearningStation's early successes led to recognition as ASP of Year in 2000, an award conferred by The ASP Consortium.

The Business Challenge:

LearningStation's core business is developing online education portals and content. Originally launched as a service bureau, LearningStation found itself managing hardware, networks and support for the schools and states it served, in addition to developing content, building portals and websites, and creating educational tools.

Jim Kirchner faced a business decision: continue to invest in ITresources to manage the company's growing environment, or re-focus effort on developing high-value content and educational software. "We evaluated doing colocation, which is where we started, or making the switch to managed services," recalls Kirchner. "We arrived at the decision to go with a managed services provider from the perspective of what it would take to continue to managethe IT environment ourselves. The analysis showed that if we continued to manage our data center in-house, we'd have to staff two to three people just waiting to make sure things were running right, or fix it if things began to go wrong. We decidedto make that someone else's challenge."

Once the decision to outsource day-to-day operations of its IT environment was made, LearningStation began the search for a managed services provider that met its stringent requirements: full managed hosting support of over 20 servers and software with load balancing and intrusion detection.

The Solution:

After evaluating a number of data center operators, LearningStation chose Hosted Solutions, a Raleigh, N.C.-based provider of managed hosting and data center services. Operating four SAS 70 Type II certified data centers, located in Charlotte, Cary and Raleigh, North Carolina and Boston, Massachusetts, Hosted Solutions offered LearningStation managed hosting and colocation services with dedicated servers, managed storage, managed load balancing, disaster recovery, and managed security services.

Initially, LearningStation transferred its hardware leases to Hosted Solutions. Hosted then offered to upgrade to new hardware. "They have folks who can talk solutions,"says Kirchner. "Their people understand technology, and were able to support us when we switched from Microsoft technology toLinux. Hosted Solutions provides us with a full solution -hardware leases, installation, software management, updates to our infrastructure and support. They are a one stop shop, very flexible and easy to work with."