Speaking of the announcement, Mr Grame Barty, Managing Director, HarvestRoad Limited said, "HarvestRoad Hive's® flexibility and high performance will not only deliver significant cost savings and productivity gains, but it will also enable oncampus GmbH to expand its global network reach to new markets rapidly. By doing this, they will meet the German government's requirement to extend higher education course services to small and medium enterprises."

One of the key requirements of the solution was to have direct connections to the open source Learning Management Systems Moodle and Sakai to manage, reassemble, reuse, and deliver content for the university consortia. HarvestRoad Hive not only excels in providing this "content bridge" from existing proprietary systems, but the company has ongoing business partnerships with Moodle, RSmart Sakai, and IBM.

Mr Barty added, "Our solution is able to respond to the needs of over 2,000 power users and manage over 150 different courses each with 300 html pages and 15,000 media items." The combined capability will enhance oncampus's status within Europe as an eLearning -˜mega-content provider' and allow it to meet the international course interoperability requirements in Europe based on the Bologna Declaration more easily.

Commenting on the collaboration, Mr Barty said, "This is our first deployment in Germany and an outstanding example of the collaborative-learning-environment solution we have recently announced with IBM, Moodle, and RSmart Sakai." Services and implementation support will be provided by HarvestRoad's long-term European business partner, Netherlands-based STOAS Learning BVA.