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True North Technology: Education

Teachers can sometimes feel as if they're being pulled in two directions: They need to spend as much time as possible working with students, yet still find time fulfill their administrative duties, such filing grades and creating curricula. For the public schools district of Richmond, Va., this tension was compounded by an information system that required teachers to handle all of their administrative tasks from within the firewall -- meaning from somewhere on school grounds.

Douglas Green, director of IT for Richmond City Public Schools, decided the best way to ease that tension was by giving teachers the tools for handling their administrative responsibilities at any time, from any place. He just wasn't sure how. The problem: Like most educational organizations, the Richmond school district had an abundance of hardware and software, managed by too-few IT staff operating on tight budgets.

"When I came to the city school system I found a variety of applications that all had different interfaces, either purchased or home grown," said Green. "I felt there had to a way to unify them."

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The trouble is, most consultants had been telling Green he'd have to rip out and replace most of the district's installed gear from Apple Computer, IBM, Microsoft and Novell. But not Douglas Nassaur -- president and CEO of True North Technology. He believed that Sun's J2EE-based technologies, including Java Connector Architecture, Liberty Alliance-compliant identification server, and portal software, would work with Richmond's installed infrastructure to create role-dependent access, combined with military-grade security, to Web-based applications and data.

"In education, any time you spend a dollar on technology you are taking a dollar away from a student," said Douglas Nassaur, "So that IT dollar has to directly benefit the educational process to the student. What we put in had to extend the utility of [Richmond's existing] investment while providing additional benefits."

In place only a few weeks, all teachers have had their first taste of using the system to submit report cards. In addition, the district now posts individual education plans for its exceptional education students, enabling administrators around the district to access each student's curriculum and progress. An Apple streaming video system delivers personalized, role-based training to all of the users, including the IT staff that manages the portal. The system has been set up initially to support 26,000 users.

"We were spending $50,000 a year to print [testing papers], and then a full day to scan grades in because the machines would jam. But grades closed at 5pm, and were posted at 6pm, instead of two days later. Partnering with True North allowed our application developers to focus on the business needs of our teachers, administrators and students. And we did it without replacing a thing."

Forsythe Solutions Group: Enterprise

Archipelago lives by the transaction. Founded in 1997 as an electronic communication network, the Chicago equities exchange originally based its IT infrastructure on Windows NT servers. By 2003, The ArcaEx exchange needed to book 5,000 orders per second, provide 500 simultaneous customer connections, and handle 10 million trades and 15 million events every day.

To accommodate an ever increasing load, Archipelago's data facilities had become burdened with more than 1,000 Windows NT servers struggling to keep pace with demand. Since nearly 100 percent of Archipelago's revenue comes by way of its trading platform, it needed room to scale. And oh yes, the platform had to be rock-solid reliable, capable of blinding speed and secure.

"We felt Sun would fit that bill," said Paul Zajdel, product director for Sun Solutions at Forsythe Solutions Group, who had heard of Archipelago's search for a new platform to run its exchange. "In the early testing, we demonstrated the benefit of running on Sparc and Solaris, how much the system would scale and the amount of trades they could do on one server."

The first phase of the system, covering over the counter trades, went live by April 2003. Now instead of a sea of NT servers, the Archipelago system comprises about 10 SunFire servers operating Solaris 9. Despite the order of magnitude reduction, the Sun gear handles more trades per second and has enabled the company to increase its market share from nearly 8.9 percent in 2002 to 12.4 percent in 2003.

"A hallmark of how we run our business is speed," said Steven Rubinow, Archipelago's CTO. "We wanted to deal with a VAR that could keep up with us. It's been a productive relationship."

According to the S1 it has filed with the SEC as a prelude to going public, Archipelago's system last year executed 295.1 million transactions in U.S. equities through its ArcaEx exchange, and handled 24.2 percent of the total trading volume in Nasdaq-listed securities. Most of those transactions were performed by Sun systems.