Giunti Labs finalises its acquisition of the leading digital content marketplace repository brand Ha

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.

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Notes for editors

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:
• Technological solutions for content, learning & knowledge management
• Architectural and technological solutions for mobile & wireless
• Consulting and training
• Content production
• Research and development

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).

About HarvestRoad Hive®

HarvestRoad Hive is a Federated Digital Repository System (FDRS). It manages any form of content used in online learning, corporate training and knowledge management initiatives.
It is designed to establish a bridge between islands of content within and across multiple institutions or organisations, regardless of the type of content or purpose for its existence. HarvestRoad Hive is used to store and manage so called "learning objects" or "knowledge objects" and their metadata, assemble these into standards-compliant packages, and deliver that content on demand to learning and course management systems, corporate training systems or web portals.
HarvestRoad Hive is an independent digital repository; it can interface with practically any ERP, Learning or Course Management System and is already integrated with several commonly used course management systems, authoring and content assembly tools.

About Giunti Labs’ learn eXact® suite

Giunti Labs’ learn eXact is an e-learning and mobile learning content management system (LCMS) that enables users to create, manage and deliver content based on learning objects, XML, standards and international specifications. It delivers learning content to location-based mobile devices, interactive TV and wearable computer devices. Now the solution with its new eXact VLW plug in also delivers standard learning contents into 3D Virtual Worlds.

Further information from:
Minna Leikas, Giunti Labs, +39 3474435167, m.leikas@giuntilabs.com
Bob Little, Bob Little Press & PR, +44 (0)1727 860405, bob.little@boblittlepr.com