BANGALORE, India, May 5, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced that Extramarks, a new age education solutions enterprise, has selected SoftLayer, an IBM company, 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.

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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 a three-year engagement, Extramarks has opted to use SoftLayer's cloud for its Extramarks Live, an e-tutorial platform that offers a wide range of content for different national and state level curricula. 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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

"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

About IBM Cloud Computing
Since 2007, IBM has invested more than $7 billion in 15 acquisitions to accelerate its cloud initiatives and build a high value cloud portfolio. IBM holds 1,560 cloud patents focused on driving innovation. In fact, IBM for the 21st consecutive year topped the annual list of US patent leaders. IBM processes more the 5.5M client transactions daily through IBM's public cloud. IBM expects to achieve $7 billion in annual cloud revenue by 2015. For more information about cloud offerings from IBM, visit http://www.ibm.com/cloud. Follow us on Twitter at @IBMcloud and on our blog at http://www.thoughtsoncloud.com. Join the conversation #ibmcloud.

About Extramarks
For more information, please visit: http://www.extramarks.com/

About IBM
For more information, please visit: http://www.ibm.com/in/en/

Media Contact
Raghavendra Ramesh (Raghu)
IBM Communications
+91 98800 36100
raghu.rags@in.ibm.com
Twitter: @ragdose

Nick Smith
IBM Communications
978 869 0870
nssmith@us.ibm.com

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SOURCE IBM

SOURCE: IBM