The 'HarvestRoad Hive' product line will play an important part of Giunti Labs' growing suite of solutions and services in the learning and technical content management field. 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 and Atlanta), as well as adding a valuable digital marketplace engine component to its 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 the 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 the 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."