SumTotal Systems Drives Custom Learning Content Business for eHigherEducation

Business Wire, Sept 14, 2004

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- Custom content solutions provider uses TotalLCMS and TotalLMS to develop and deliver specialized curricula and courseware to tens of thousands of users worldwide

SumTotal Systems (Nasdaq:SUMT), the industry's largest provider of learning and business performance technologies, services and processes, announced today that eHigherEducation, a custom content and learning solution provider, has chosen SumTotal to help drive the creation and delivery of pre-packaged curricula and custom content solutions to tens of thousands of users in corporate, government and educational organizations across the globe.

eHigherEducation offers a variety of specialized learning curricula, including the entire Alcoa Quality Institute curriculum of 23 courses on quality concepts and techniques, a set of OSHA courses developed in partnership with Eastern Michigan University, and other self-contained learning and certification programs. In addition to these curricula, eHigherEducation also develops custom content designed to meet specific business and organizational performance objectives for its customers.

eHigherEducation needed a solution that gave it greater flexibility in creating compelling, interactive content to meet its clients' increasingly sophisticated and complex learning needs. Because it needed to rapidly implement a new platform to keep pace with customer demand, finding a solution in a dedicated, professional hosting environment was also a key factor for the company. Following a rigorous evaluation of available technologies, eHigherEducation chose a hosted version of SumTotal's TotalLCMS to help create highly customized, multi-media content and courseware. The company also will use a hosted version of the TotalLMS to provide its courseware offerings to customers that have not implemented their own LMS.

SumTotal's comprehensive hosting services allow organizations to quickly deploy and become productive using SumTotal applications. By hosting the SumTotal Enterprise Suite, SumTotal Systems provides customers with 360-degree support and ensures that all applications run on the most resilient, fault-tolerant equipment available, from installation and configuration to handling daily server administration and maintenance to supporting end-user questions about product features and functionality. This enables customers to focus on maximizing the value of their learning technology without a significant investment in IT infrastructure and resources.

In addition to its strong hosting services, eHigherEducation chose SumTotal because of its ability to do aggressive R & D and to be an industry leader in innovation, according to CEO Ed Goldberg. "In today's learning market, we're dealing with much more knowledgeable clients and an extraordinary rapidity of technological and creative change. Customers have more sophisticated demands regarding how they want learning to look, feel and function and the impact they want it to have on their businesses. They're looking for a wider range of solution offerings than ever before. We felt that partnering with SumTotal would allow us to evolve our solutions at least as fast if not faster than our customers' needs."

"SumTotal has developed a strong network of content solution partners who use our technology to offer more robust, target solutions to their customers, and, as a result, increase their revenue, their customer bases and their marketshare," said R. Andrew Eckert, SumTotal CEO. "By providing a comprehensive platform and technology infrastructure to eHigherEducation, SumTotal can better enable it to capitalize on the exploding market for online learning and help it continue to ensure the business success of its customers."

About eHigherEducation

eHigherEducation partners with corporations, colleges and universities, government agencies, associations, school districts, the military, labor unions and others to provide total e-learning solutions. eHigherEducation is known for developing custom e-learning courses and programs that fit the needs of your organization. Whether it is building a custom course from scratch or converting classroom training to e-learning, our commitment is to help customers achieve their goals. For more information, visit www.ehighereducation.com, www.alcoaqualityinstitute.com and www.emuworldwide.net.

About SumTotal Systems

SumTotal Systems Inc. (Nasdaq:SUMT) is the business performance and learning technology industry's largest single provider of technologies, processes and services. Formed by the merger of industry pioneers Docent and Click2learn, the company is uniquely focused on helping organizations harness and manage mission-critical intellectual power to solve real-world business problems and produce significant bottom-line results. SumTotal has helped accelerate performance and profit for more than 600 of the world's best-known companies and federal and local government agencies, including Microsoft, the US Army, Cingular Wireless, US Air Force, Vodafone, Lucent, USDA, DSHS, Accenture, Cendant, Harley-Davidson, Wyeth, Wachovia and D & B. SumTotal Systems is headquartered in Mountain View, CA, with offices throughout the US, as well as in London, Paris, Heidelberg, Sydney, Tokyo and Hyderabad, India.