Centra Acquires Online E-Learning Firm MindLever
LEXINGTON, MA – Centra (NASDAQ: CTRA), a provider of software and ASP services for live eLearning and business collaboration, today announced an agreement to acquire MindLever, a provider of management systems for learning content. Based in Raleigh, North Carolina, MindLever pioneered the first, standards-based solution for creating, storing, and delivering live and self-paced learning content in the form of personalized eLearning programs. Centra intends to integrate MindLever capabilities into its market-leading infrastructure for live eLearning and real-time collaboration, enabling customers to increase the effectiveness of their live eLearning programs with personalized and on-demand access to rich multimedia content. The terms of the cash and stock agreement were not immediately disclosed.
Customer experience has confirmed that the most powerful and cost-effective learning strategies are the ones that blend live interactive sessions with access to self-paced, task-specific content, such as streamed recordings, simulations, and presentations, said Leon Navickas, CEO of Centra. This combination positions Centra to define and deliver the next generation of eLearning solutions, and further underscores our commitment to help organizations achieve measurable business results through the accelerated delivery of knowledge across the extended enterprise.
Strong, Complementary Offering
Since delivering its first product in 1997, Centra has achieved market leadership by offering comprehensive solutions to customers worldwide, helping them to achieve top-line results and rapid return-on-investment through the acceleration of key business processes such as new product introductions, software training, and customer-oriented applications.The combination of Centras live eLearning capabilities – including the ability to easily capture, edit, store and re-use content and interactions derived from live online sessions – with MindLevers functionality for creating and managing content components, also known as learning objects, will enable organizations to target the appropriate mix of content and learning formats for a specific audience or business task.
Delivering the right content in the right format is the key to eLearning success. There is an imperative market need for applications and methodologies that help to organize the development and deployment process, said Harvi Singh, MindLever Co-Founder and Chief Learning Technology Officer. That is why content creation, management, personalization, and delivery have become such important, strategic issues in eLearning today, and why we strongly believe that the integration of Centra and MindLever products and services will create a superior solution to the challenges that many companies face today.
MindLevers software and ASP solutions enable people to teach, learn, collaborate, assess, and organize their knowledge assets without the cost of complex IT infrastructure and support. These solutions include a set of Composer tools that can be used to index business content for easy retrieval, add learning-specific extensions such as testing, learning games and simulations, and output this content in industry-standard (SCORM-compliant) formats. Classified in the emerging category of Learning Content Management Systems (LCMS), MindLever functionality is highly complementary to the value delivered to organizations by Learning Management Systems (LMS), such as those from Saba and Docent, which are designed to provide enterprise-level management of users, training activities and resources.
About Centra
With over 1.3 million users worldwide, Centra is the worlds leading provider of software infrastructure and ASP services for live eLearning and business collaboration. Already used in over 500 companies worldwide, Centras Web-based enterprise products and services share a common collaboration framework, and are optimized to address the full range of real-time human interactions necessary to accelerate internal and market-facing business processes. Every product features Centras hallmark voice-over-IP capabilities, robust collaboration tools, and intuitive user interface to enable live conversation and interaction over low-bandwidth network connections.
Today hundreds of global organizations have standardized on Centra for the delivery of live eLearning, including Accenture, Century 21, Dominos Pizza, EMC Corporation, Siemens, and Procter & Gamble. Centra supports a vital ecosystem of strategic eLearning partnerships, which include alliances with Microsoft, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Deloitte Consulting, Cisco, Oracle, Saba, Docent, Global Knowledge, and 27 international value-added resellers covering 29 countries. Headquartered in Bostons technology corridor, the Company has sales offices throughout North America, Europe and Asia. For more information, visit http://www.centra.com.
