eCollege Achieves Industry-Leading System Availability
eCollege(SM) Achieves Industry-Leading System Availability
While Supporting Record Enrollments
DENVER – February 17, 2003 – eCollege(SM) [Nasdaq: ECLG], a leading provider of technology and services for online higher education programs, today announced it achieved record system availability of 99.99 percent for 2002, averaging less than 5 minutes of downtime a month. This marks an improvement over the 99.97 percent system availability the Company achieved in 2001. Additional highlights from 2002 are as follows:
· eCollege was able to achieve this level of system availability while supporting a record 354,000 student enrollments for the year.
· eCollege had an average of approximately 6.9 million hits per day, peaking at 10.9 million hits in a single day. This is up from an average of 3.8 million hits per day last year.
“As many of our customers grow their online programs to thousands of online enrollments per institution, our industry-leading levels of scalability and reliability are absolutely critical to their student and faculty satisfaction and retention, and ultimately program growth and success,” said Oakleigh Thorne, chairman and CEO of eCollege. “The fact that we were able to improve our system availability year-over-year while supporting the aggressive growth of our customers’ online programs demonstrates the leverage of our ASP model, and the overall strength of our operation.”
In addition to a milestone year in 2002, eCollege is off to a record start for 2003. Since January 1, eCollege has achieved 100 percent system availability. Additionally, the Company has averaged approximately 10.3 million hits per day, peaking at 15.3 million hits in a single day and more than one million hits in a single hour.
“Our system availability is continually monitored worldwide by an independent 3rd party, and therefore the results are completely externally verifiable,” said Mark Resmer, chief technology officer of eCollege. “This minute-by-minute monitoring of our system from 25 locations on five continents enables us to analyze trends and proactively identify potential issues long before they affect system availability for our users.”
eCollege’s hosted environment is built on the most current technologies from Microsoft and Dell to provide extremely high levels of scalability and reliability required to support successful online programs. Additionally, the Company maintains a back-up data center, which offers complete redundancy to fully operate all eCollege-hosted online programs in the case of a catastrophic event.
About eCollege
eCollege [Nasdaq: ECLG] is a leading eLearning technology and services provider to educational markets. The Company designs, builds and supports some of the most successful, fully online degree, certificate/diploma and professional development programs in the country. eCollege’s customers include publicly-traded for-profit institutions, community colleges, public and private universities, school districts, and state departments of education. The Company was founded in 1996 and is headquartered in Denver. For more information, visit www.eCollege.com.
This news release contains “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the securities laws. These statements are based on management’s current expectations and are subject to a number of uncertainties and risks. Actual results may differ materially. Important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from estimates or projections contained in the forward-looking statements include, but are not limited to, our ability to provide continuous, uninterrupted service; our network infrastructure and computer systems failing; future technological advances by our competitors; the vulnerability of our network to security risks; and such other factors as are discussed in our most recent Form 10-K Annual Report filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”), which you are encouraged to review in connection with this release. We believe that these forward-looking statements are reasonable, however, you should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements, which are based on current expectations and speak only as of the date of this release. We are not obligated to publicly release any revisions to forward-looking statements to reflect events after the date of this release.
eCollege is a service mark of eCollege. All other trademarks and service marks or registered trademarks or service marks are the property of their respective owners.
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