Acquia Delivers Integrated Digital Experiences for Higher Education Institutions

ANAHEIM, CA--(Marketwired - Oct 16, 2013) - EDUCAUSE Annual Conference - Acquia, where great digital experiences begin, today announced it is working with more than 300 higher education institutions, helping them gain the freedom and agility to build great digital experiences and speed their time to market. With Acquia, colleges and universities are discovering how open source technology powerfully integrates both the real and virtual campus. As a result, Acquia has experienced significant growth in higher education, increasing its roster of university clients by 40 percent in the past year.

Higher education is a hyper-competitive environment, one that requires institutions to rise above the noise and explore new ways to attract students and engage alumni by surpassing sophisticated expectations set by the current state of the web. Despite an ever-growing number of websites and the need to bring the digital campus to smartphones and tablets, institutions must consistently deliver high quality content that can be easily updated. Competing in this environment is more difficult for schools that often work under resource and budget constraints. As a result, colleges and universities recognize the importance of delivering content-rich, socially-enabled digital experiences, supported at scale with a high-performance, highly secure cloud platform.

Acquia Cloud, which delivers scalability, security, and high performance for Drupal sites, allows the University of Minnesota to deliver digital experiences with resilience, ensuring that none of its more than 600 websites experience downtime. Additionally, with unmatched scalability, the school can enjoy a sustainable approach to delivering an amazing digital experience, regardless of how students, staff or faculty access content.

"We have a number of departments within our school that have their own content to share, but we lacked a unified presence, and couldn't deliver the type of seamless digital experience both prospective and existing students look for," said Steve Nguyen, service owner within the Collaboration & Web Content Services group at the University of Minnesota. "We selected Acquia because we needed a customizable solution, one that enables us to take advantage of the ever-evolving technology, but is still user friendly. With Acquia's easy-to-use, pre-built tools and infrastructure, we can quickly assess site performance and easily drag-and-drop code from staging developments to production, giving each of our departments the freedom to keep their own content updated in near real-time."

"Our education customers value the speed and economy that our technology provides," said Steve Halliwell, director for state, local and education at Amazon Web Services (AWS). Acquia Cloud is built on Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). "We hear from large and small institutions that the use of web services is critical to their ability to attract the best students and improve their operating models to keep costs down."

A number of major challenges are creating a rapidly shifting landscape in higher education. Among these challenges are the growth of mobile technologies, outcomes-driven evaluations, containing the increasing cost of education, online learning, and open access. Combined with the evolution of the always-connected student, there has been a pivotal shift in the way schools can communicate effectively. Schools that learn how to leverage the cloud and open source technology to deploy digital initiatives find they can enhance recruiting efforts, support learning and research, and more deeply engage the campus community.

"It's critical for higher education institutions to be able to make a strong impression for students, both online and via mobile devices," said Chris Hartigan, general manager, higher education at Acquia. "In a survey we conducted this year of more than 300 higher education institutions, more than 90 percent of respondents stated mobile content delivery was the top strategic directive for their organization's digital strategy. Yet mobile delivery is still the biggest challenge. Acquia gives higher education institutions around the world the freedom and agility to leverage the benefits of Drupal for both the web and mobile access, while providing peace of mind that their site is secure and scalable."

Acquia works with higher education institutions of all sizes, helping them go to market faster and generate greater ROI from their digital investments. Cambridge College, Point Loma Nazarene University, Saïd Business School, Stanford University, and Western Governors University are among Acquia's more than 300 higher education clients. 

For more information on Acquia's solutions for higher education institutions, visit Acquia during the EDUCAUSE Annual Conference at Booth No. 1561, or visit www.acquia.com.

About Acquia
Acquia is where great digital experiences begin. Acquia is helping some of the world's leading brands succeed, including Twitter, Mercedes Benz, Warner Music Group, and Stanford University. Join the more than 3,800 organizations that are moving at the speed of the web with Acquia's solutions for content, community and commerce. Acquia offers developer tools, cloud solutions and global expertise to drive success the open source way.

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