eCollege Further Advances Technology Infrastructure
DENVER – March 9, 2004 – eCollege(SM) [Nasdaq: ECLG], a leading provider of value-added information services to the post-secondary education market, today announced a series of hardware upgrades and system architecture advancements that propel its industry-leading technology infrastructure to even higher levels of scalability, reliability and performance to support the continued growth and success of its customers’ online programs.
“Our IT infrastructure was already unmatched in the industry, and now we have set a new standard for scalability in eLearning,” said Oakleigh Thorne, chairman and CEO of eCollege. “These advancements are a routine part of our continued investment in the success of our customers’ programs as we follow a sophisticated and evolving capacity plan to stay several steps ahead of what is required to support program growth and depth.”
These hardware upgrades and system architecture advancements enable eCollege to support increasing enrollments as well as larger and more complex online programs, while also providing a better experience for users, helping to drive increased faculty adoption and increased student completion and retention. Since the advancements went live in early January, eCollege has seen considerably faster response times, while supporting the highest level of usage in the post-secondary eLearning industry.
Scalability – eCollege has created an architecture that will support multiple database instances, enabling the company to scale its application almost infinitely. Even without adding more hardware, eCollege can handle three times the enrollments it currently supports, which are at an all time high, and more than twice the maximum number of enrollments it is projecting this year.
Reliability – Additional upgrades to the database servers further increase eCollege’s redundancy and reliability. To date, for the 2003-2004 academic year beginning last August, eCollege has had no unscheduled downtime, achieving 100 percent system availability.
Performance – The advancements provide increased speed and responsiveness for an enhanced user experience. Since the beginning of January, eCollege has logged more than 290 million usage minutes on its system without any degradation, averaging approximately 5 million usage minutes, which is roughly equivalent to 10 person years, per day.
According to Dr. Alan Roper, director of administration for the Golden Gate University CyberCampus, “Even before eCollege upgraded its system, we were able to provide our faculty and students with a high performing system that would have been very challenging and expensive for us to maintain on our own, let alone as our program expands. Not only can we rely on the expertise and experience of eCollege, we can automatically access its latest technology as an inherent benefit of its ASP solution without any additional investment on our part.”
Mark Resmer, chief technology officer of eCollege, commented, “As part of our quality commitment to our customers, we conducted numerous rehearsals and dry runs to ensure a seamless upgrade, resulting in no unexpected disruptions during implementation over the winter/holiday break. Our thorough quality assurance process included load and performance testing, as well as extensive fail-over testing of the new hardware to provide the highest level of redundancy and reliability right from the start.”
About eCollege
eCollege [Nasdaq: ECLG] is a leading provider of value-added information services to the post-secondary and K-12 education markets. The Company’s eLearning Division designs, builds and supports some of the most successful, fully online degree, certificate/diploma and professional development programs in the country. The Company’s Enrollment Division, Datamark, Inc., helps institutions build new enrollments and increase student retention. Customers include publicly traded for-profit institutions, community colleges, public and private universities, school districts, and state departments of education. eCollege was founded in 1996 and is headquartered in Denver. Datamark was founded in 1987 and is headquartered in Salt Lake City. For more information, visit www.eCollege.com and www.Datamark.com.
This news release contains statements that are not historical in nature and that may be characterized as “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the securities laws including those related to the performance of our technology and service solution, customer satisfaction with our products and services, and the success of our clients’ programs. 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 clients’ ability to achieve successful online programs, including faculty adoption of the eCollege System, and increased student completion and retention rates; our network infrastructure and computer systems failing, including the possibility that we may not be able to sustain our current levels of system uptime or achieve the necessary levels of scalability; the vulnerability of our network to security risks; the possibility that we may not be able to achieve continued growth or profitability, or maintain current levels of revenue; and such other factors as are discussed in our most recent Form 10-Q Quarterly 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 or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
