Giunti Labs Acquires HarvestRoad Hive Digital Repository

Giunti have a pretty impressive track record when it comes to educational materials - in 1841, Alessandro and Felice Paggi set up the printing and publishing company Giunti Editore in Florence, specialising in the publication of school textbooks and books for children and young people.

Giunti have continued in the same tradition up to the present day, but with modern refinements, and Giunti Labs is now one of Europe’s leading e-learning and mobile content management solution providers.

So it is interesting to hear that Giunti Labs has acquired the Australian federated digital repository system HarvestRoad®.

This acquisition fits well with Giunti Labs existing range of services aimed at content, learning and knowledge management needs. Giunti’s piece de resistance is the learn eXact® suite, which is impressively interoperable with all the major vendor-driven and open source LMS and VLE solutions around, including Plateau, Oracle, SumTotal, Saba, WebCT, Blackboard, Sakai, LRN and Moodle. That’s quite a list.

Along with Harvest Road®, Giunti Labs have also acquired the digital repository and technical content management system HarvestRoad Hive®.

This move will certainly extend Giunti Labs’ international influence, as not only do they have branches in some very key cities of Europe, namely, Florence, Milan, Rome, London, Lund (that’s Sweden) and Frankfurt, but also in Boston, MA, and Atlanta, GA, and now in Sydney and Perth, Australia.

Giunti CEO Fabrizio Cardinali points out the increased requirement for learning that exists in present times: “Today, economic globalization and the resulting pressures on labor 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.”

In relation to the new acquisition, Cardinali says, “HarvestRoad’s 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.”

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.”

Stephan Thieringer of Giunti Labs North America adds, “HarvestRoad and Giunti Labs solutions have both been well received by customers in North America that want to leverage and maximize the value of their digital assets. By combining the technologies, solutions, and organizations of our two companies—our users in education, government, defense, and corporate enterprises will benefit greatly.”

It looks as though Giunti Labs will definitely be one to watch in the future for those interested in content management in relation to learning and education.

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