Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Maxnet Wins Hosting For Ministry Of Education Tender
Maxnet, a leading second tier Internet Service Provider (ISP) has been selected to help deliver a student management
system (SMS) to schools through-out New Zealand.
The Ministry of Education (Ministry) is implementing strategy whereby all schools within New Zealand will be encouraged
to use an accredited SMS system to help obtain better educational outcomes by 2008.
As part of this initiative, the Ministry have embarked on the eSMS project, aimed at providing SMS to schools which do
not currently use an accredited SMS and have a roll size of less than 250 students.
A tender was undertaken during 2005 and MXL Consolidated Pty Limited (MXL), an Australian based, publicly listed
software development company, with its SMS, eMinerva, established a consortium to respond to the tender, including
Maxnet as the data and application host.
In late 2005 MXL and its consortium was selected as the preferred supplier to deliver a long term, robust and scalable
hosted electronic solution to schools throughout New Zealand.
“Maxnet is absolutely delighted to have secured this opportunity,” says Brett Herkt, Maxnet Managing Director. “This
government contract endorses Maxnet’s strategy of investing heavily in people and infrastructure able to deliver high
grade services to customers with a critical reliance on the Internet.”
Maxnet underwent facility audits by both MXL and the Ministry prior to being confirmed as the preferred hosting
provider. The hosting environment – comprised of a fully redundant webfarm sitting behind a high availability firewall –
recently went ‘live’ at Maxnet’s Internet Data Centre at Albany Auckland.
“Maxnet’s contribution to the multi-million dollar three year project is a significant and high profile addition to our
business,” says Herkt. “We believe that being accepted into the consortium after open competition with larger rivals
reflects one of our competitive advantages, namely our ability to deliver top quality technical services more flexibly
and competitively than our major competitors.”
In excess of seventy five schools have already signed up to utilise the MXL's eMinerva eSMS solution with a large number
of other schools expressing interest. The webfarm is fully scaleable and well able to cope with anticipated significant
future growth in the number of schools deploying this service.
Read more at;
http://www.minedu.govt.nz/index.cfm?layout=index=5646=1010
ENDS