Skoodat acquires assets of Teacher’s Pal

February 9, 2009 — Chattanooga, TN — Skoodat LLC, the creators of the first cloud-based computing platform for education, announced today that they have completed an acquisition of all intellectual property assets from Teacher’s Pal, Inc. of Phoenix, AZ.

Teacher’s Pal had provided software to the K-12 education marketplace for more than 12 years, specializing in the area of curriculum and instructional management.

“Schools do not want to be in the business of building and maintaining their own internal information technology infrastructure anymore,” says Ben Birdsell, president of the Association for More Effective Schools. “Right now, schools and districts are spending significant dollars just to keep things from falling apart. By leveraging cloud-based Web services, schools can get out of the IT infrastructure business and focus on innovation.”

According to Teacher’s Pal principal, Karsten Louis Solheim, “When I was at IBM I witnessed the radical shift from mainframe computing to client-server. Now the next phase — cloud computing — represents an even bigger leap in the right direction. The time is right to transfer all that we learned at Teacher’s Pal to a new generation who can ride the cloud-computing wave to deliver huge benefits to educators and learners of all ages.”

“Teacher’s Pal discovered moving to .NET as their platform proved too complicated, too expensive to maintain and downright traumatic to upgrade once customizations were made,” noted Skoodat Chief Technology Officer, Tim Youngblood. Youngblood recently left Bluewolf, the second largest consulting partner of SaaS applications on the Force.com platform, to join the Skoodat management team.

“For delivering small sites and applications, .NET is certainly one approach. The problem Teacher’s Pal discovered is the scalability and brittleness that occurs when you try to deliver beyond the basics. This is where the cloud approach doesn’t disappoint. The Skoodat platform scales to factor of ten levels and upgrades are seamless and painless; this can make a huge, positive difference for schools and districts.”

“By acquiring Teacher’s Pal’s intellectual property and combining it with these completely refreshing tools, we can help schools leapfrog into the cloud-computing era with lower risk, lower cost, and innovative software services.”

“I am confident that Skoodat is the right company to help schools leverage our years of learning from teachers and administrators,”says Solheim. “Skoodat’s team has the education and development experience to create a major win for educators, and they are moving much faster than I thought possible. In less than 60 days they have built what would have taken us two years to build in .NET — and at a fraction of the cost.”

The Skoodat acquisition has been quietly in the works since October of 2008. Terms of the deal remain private, but required Teacher’s Pal to cease daily operations. Skoodat will not be providing support for Teacher’s Pal legacy client-server products, but will work with schools and districts who desire to move from Teacher’s Pal CLASS and InstructiON software to the new Skoodat education platform.

Skoodat expects to officially launch its platform in 2009, but has already begun soliciting feedback on in-progress development from educators. Representatives of Skoodat will be attending the upcoming AASA conference in San Francisco and the ASCD conference in Orlando. If you would like to view the Skoodat platform in action, please contact Jeff Swanson at 423-244-0204 or by email at jeff@skoodat.com.