Extramarks Selects IBM's SoftLayer Cloud Platform for Content Delivery

Extramarks, an educational website for parents, students and teachers, will leverage IBM‘s (IBM’s) SoftLayer cloud platform to deliver educational content to thousands of K-12 students across 250 locations in India. SoftLayer, an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider, will support the Extramarks Live e-tutorial platform.

“Extramarks has [a] presence in 250 cities and we required an IT environment to scale up adequately and efficiently … We are excited with the prospects of how SoftLayer will enhance our student experience to consume content,” Extramarks Chairman Atul Kulshrestha said in a prepared statement.

According to a statement from the company, Extramarks was launched in 2009 “to supplement and provide an enriching learning experience focused on the all-round development of [each child].” Extramarks Live provides educational content for different national and state-level curricula, and 700,000 students currently use it to access custom learning materials.

Kulshrestha said Extramarks has entered into a three-year partnership with SoftLayer for Extramarks Live’s infrastructure services. In a prepared statement, IBM noted SoftLayer helps ensure a seamless delivery of educational content to Extramarks Live users.

“Delivering personalized educational content in visual form will be the future for education in India,” Ganesh Margabandhu, general manager of global technology services for IBM India/South Asia, said in a prepared statement. “We have enabled Extramarks [to] address the growing requirements of its student constituency while at the same time reducing [its] overall IT services costs.”

IBM continues to search for ways to improve SoftLayer and announced the integration of IBM Power Systems into the SoftLayer cloud infrastructure in February. In addition, SoftLayer is helping IBM increase its revenues, thanks in part to SoftLayer’s flexible pricing and subscription model that is proving to be popular with enterprises.