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Giunti Labs
Master
List
Giunti Labs, Exchange House, 494 Midsummer Boulevard, Milton Keynes MK9
2EA
Tel +44 (0)1908 306009/ +44 (0) 7733 365063; Web
www.giuntilabs.com
13th March 2008
Giunti Labs finalises its acquisition of the leading digital content
marketplace repository brand HarvestRoad®
Giunti Labs, Europe's leading e-learning and mobile content management
solution provider, has finalised its acquisition of the Australian
HarvestRoad® brand as well as its HarvestRoad Hive® digital repository,
TCMS Technical Content Management System and related Intellectual
Property Rights (IPR) and worldwide installations.
Giunti Labs is pleased to announce that its acquisition of the IPR,
assets and contracts of HarvestRoad Hive® digital repository and of the
technical content management system (TCMS), along with their
installations worldwide is now completed, and both the brand and IPR
are now fully owned by Giunti Labs.
As a result, the 'HarvestRoad Hive' product line will remain - to play
an important part of Giunti Labs' growing suite of solutions and
services within the learning and technical content management space. As
such, Giunti Labs has integrated HarvestRoad's skilled workforce into
the newly established Giunti Labs Asia Pacific subsidiary, with offices
in Perth and Sydney, Australia.
This move will extend Giunti Labs' global reach, complementing its
presence in Europe (Florence, Milan, Rome, London, Lund and Frankfurt)
and North America (Boston, MA, and Atlanta, GA) as well as adding a
valuable digital marketplace engine component to its world-leading
digital content management suite offering.
Fabrizio Cardinali, CEO of Giunti Labs, commented: "Today, economic
globalisation and the resulting pressures on labour market
competitiveness are providing new challenges for our educational
systems. Employees, students and citizens are being asked to develop
new skills and competencies in a fraction of time that has been the
accepted norm - and at proficiency levels previously unknown.
"The advent of 3G, mobile, location-based and broadband internet,
together with the swift advance of social networking, is putting people
all over the globe in touch as never before," he added. "This can
provide unmatched benefits to our day-to-day working habits and
learning conditions if governments, academia and industry start
investing in new generation digital content marketplaces for the shared
creation, harvesting and distribution of richer and more personalisable
learning resources.
"Acquiring HarvestRoad's educational and technical content management
technologies is a key point in our long-term drive towards excellence
in learning and knowledge content production, as well as in its
management and delivery value chain," continued Cardinali. "HarvestRoad
Hive and TCMS technologies complement our flagship learning content
management system (LCMS), learn eXact® , which also offers innovative
mobile, virtual and location based content authoring and rendering
capability, with a scalable and reliable architecture for rich media
caching and distribution within educational and technical documentation
scenarios.
"The integration of our offering is expected to begin immediately and
will be based on open service orientated standards and architectures
for education, such as MIT's OKI OSIDs and IBM's SOA.
"This will enable seamless interoperability among the various optional
components and smooth integration with any third party standard virtual
learning environment (VLE) and learning management system (LMS)," he
explained. "This includes flagship open source solutions such as Moodle®
and Sakai®, with whom both learn eXact® and HarvestRoad Hive®
repository technologies interoperate already - using OKI OSID
protocols."
Michael King, Vice President IBM Education Industry, commented: This
acquisition brings together two leaders in learning technology,
particularly addressing the need for educational institutions to create
and deploy course content in a flexible, standards-based
infrastructure. We see clients seeking to deploy more advanced content
management and learning solutions to meet the requirements of 21st
century education, and the integrated solution from Giunti Labs -
incorporating HarvestRoad Hive - provides a high quality solution.
"IBM partnership with Giunti Labs, and the integration of HarvestRoad
Hive within IBM solutions means we will be able to assist our clients
in implementing this solution in an open, flexible environment."
"Given the worldwide coverage and renowned capability of both
providers, this acquisition should turn into a win-win solution for the
learning and content management arena, benefiting publishers,
producers, corporates and educational institutions willing to exploit
the benefits of, and advances in, the production, management, delivery,
interchange and re-use of new generation digital contents for learning,
knowledge, performance and business processes support," Cardinali
concluded.
end
Notes for editors
Pictures of Andrea Gentili and Paolo Sicca are available, on request,
from Bob Little Press & PR (tel 00 44 (0) 1727 860405; email
bob.little@boblittlepr.com)
About Giunti Labs
Giunti is unique in the international publishing industry.
In 1497, Giunti publishers and typographers in Florence, together with
others in Venice, began modern book manufacturing. Over the years
Giunti has built a 'historical catalogue' of huge dimensions, through a
gradual process of 'fusion' of different publishers, but also through
the creation of new brands, including Giunti Labs. Giunti Editore now
includes 20 companies in the publishing sector.
Giunti Labs, which has its global headquarters in Italy and offices in
London (UK), Frankfurt (Germany), Lund (Sweden) and in Boston (US),
provides a wide range of services, in response to any content, learning
and knowledge management need, covering:
-
Content production
-
Research and
development
-
Technological
solutions for content, learning & knowledge management
-
Architectural and
technological solutions for mobile & wireless
-
Training and
consulting
Giunti Labs provides
the learn eXact® suite, Europe's leading e-learning and mobile learning
content management technology. This suite is interoperable with all
major vendor-driven and open source LMS and VLE solutions in the market
including Plateau, Oracle, SumTotal, Saba, WebCT, Blackboard, Sakai,
LRN and Moodle.
Moreover, Giunti Labs does not just adhere to the international
standards relating to the LMS/LCMS world, it is one of the
organisations that helps to determine and drive these standards:
co-writing and developing them. Giunti Labs plays a key role in most of
the international institutions for the definition of eLearning
specifications (IEEE LTSC, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC36, CEN/ISSS WSLT, AICC, IMS,
ADL-SCORM and OKI).
Further information from:
Minna Leikas, Giunti Labs, +39 3489 399127
Bob Little, Bob Little Press & PR, +44 (0)1727 860405
