Blackboard Managed Hosting currently supports about 8.5 million active users and approximately 950 education, corporate, and government clients worldwide, offering hosting facilities in the United States, the Netherlands, and Australia.

As the management of learning environments becomes more complex and the need for more reliable uptime becomes more important, institutions have increasingly leveraged Blackboard's hosting capabilities. In doing so, they're achieving greater uptime and a partner with the technical expertise to manage installations, upgrades, and day-to-day system maintenance, enabling their institutional IT staff to spend more time working to improve overall systems to better support learning programs.

With guaranteed uptime rates of up to 99.9 percent, Blackboard provides a reliable, secure, and high-performance infrastructure that supports student and institutional success. Blackboard's data centres typically average over 150 million Internet hits a day during peak times and are staffed around the clock to guard against threats to physical and data security, natural disasters, and network outages of all types, while also providing a highly reliable and secure hosting environment.

"Opening a data centre in Canada underscores our commitment to providing the best mix of technology and services to institutions in Canada", says Harry Choi, vice president of Blackboard Managed Hosting. "We've seen that clients who rely on our experience and technical expertise spend less time worrying about system management and can devote more of their attention to improving and growing programmes, so we're excited to present a stronger set of capabilities to Canadian institutions."