Blackboard Opens Second European Data Centre to Support Increased Demand for Hosting from Colleges & Universities

February 18, 2009 – Blackboard Inc. (NASDAQ: BBBB), a global leader in education technology, today announced the opening of its second data centre in Amsterdam, reinforcing the Company’s commitment to supporting the growing number of European institutions that have turned to Blackboard to host and manage their learning environments.

Blackboard’s two European data centres now provide hosting services to more than 50 institutions across the continent. Glasgow Caledonian University and the University of Birmingham have both recently established new hosting agreements with Blackboard. In addition, Leiden University in the Netherlands and The University of Manchester have recently extended their hosting agreements.

With the increasing financial and staffing limitations in the education, corporate and government industries, managed hosting has become an increasingly valuable cost saving option. And as learning management systems play a more important role in supporting student success, a growing number of institutions have sought solutions to help manage the day-to-day administration of their learning environments, allowing them to focus more on teaching and learning and less on technology.

“We rely on the Blackboard’s hosting to deliver a large scale virtual learning solution to our students, and believe that our efforts will benefit greatly from Blackboard’s new European data centre,” said Sarah Morgan, Strategic Projects Manager at The University of Manchester. “Our campus has witnessed a growing number of students who choose to combine their academic study with employment, and this means that our e-learning offering must provide students with reliable, robust, real time access to their tutors, course material and campus wide learning resources.”

Together, Blackboard operates a total of six data centres in the United States, the Netherlands and Australia that support e-learning applications for more than 600 clients in the education, corporate and government fields worldwide. Overall, Blackboard guarantees a 99.7 percent uptime rate, though the company has actually achieved a 99.9 percent over the last year across all data centres.

“The opening of a second European data centre was essential to meeting the increasing demand we are seeing from European institutions,” said Harry Choi, Vice President of Blackboard Managed HostingSM. “Institutions need reliable, secure, high performance infrastructure to support their increasingly complex virtual learning environments. Many are finding that managed hosting is an essential ingredient in their efforts to drive student and institutional success.”

Blackboard Managed Hosting supports 6 million active users, more than 3.5 million course sites and more than 350 million Internet hits a day during peak activity. Collectively, more than 2,000 servers are managed daily which monitor over 18,000 services every few minutes, including a broad range of Blackboard software installations and third party services supported by Blackboard Managed Hosting.

Staffed around the clock and throughout the year, Blackboard Managed Hosting guards against threats to physical and data security, natural disasters and network outages of all types, providing highly reliable, secure and cost effective hosting environments for education, corporate and government clients.

For more information about Blackboard Managed Hosting, please visit http://blackboard.com/Support/Services/Managed-Hosting.aspx.