News for and about the Internet2 community

[Todd Sedmak <>]

Internet2 Opens West Coast Office

Higher Education Seeks Tech Partners To Advance Research & Education

Emeryville, Calif.—Nov. 28, 2012--According to the National Venture Capital 
Association, investors poured $400 million last year into 
education-technology companies. Bay Area and West Coast leading technology 
firms, including Adobe, Box, Brocade, Cisco, Evogh, HP, Juniper Networks, 
Splunk, Vidyo and VMware are actively pursuing the higher education market 
with new offerings and solutions tailored for the education communities. 

To assist industry and higher education, the nation’s major research 
universities, via their technology consortium, Internet2, recently opened a 
West Coast office in Emeryville, California. Internet2, a close partner with 
technology leaders and innovative networking companies, will now have an 
office near its West Coast members and will influence the direction 
technology companies take involving everything from e-textbooks to Big Data 
scientific research. 

Internet2 includes more than 220 major research universities, such as 
Caltech, Stanford, University of California-Berkeley, University of 
California-Davis, California State University-East Bay, University of Oregon, 
University of Utah and Washington State, and nearly 120 industry, affiliate 
and research and education members. Internet2’s California regional network 
partner, California’s Corporation for Education Network Initiatives (CENIC), 
will also share space with the consortium giving them a Northern California 
presence to complement their Southern California headquarters.

Internet2 also recently hired former UC-Berkeley’s Associate Vice Chancellor 
and Chief Information Officer Shelton Waggener. Along with Waggener, other 
strategic hires and resources will be based in Emeryville to serve the 
growing demand for Internet2’s high performance network, cloud, research 
support services, industry relations and other programs. Waggener leads 
Internet2’s implementation of emerging cloud and advanced technologies on 
behalf of the member campuses supporting large-scale adoption of new research 
and education. 

In 2012, Internet2 engaged 29 cloud computing companies and more than 150 of 
its university members to drive down the cost and complexity of adopting 
these emerging solutions and developing higher education specific cloud 
services. This represents tens of millions of dollars in value for its 
members. 

Internet2's members are able to leverage the nations fastest research and 
education network – Internet2’s 100G-enabled, 8.8 terabit optical network to 
deliver cloud services and keep pace with the exponential growth in Big Data 
science being driven by the nation's collaborative researchers in labs and 
universities. The combination of this new network and expanded education and 
research focused cloud services enable transformational new solutions for 
education delivery and provide better-yielding solutions for university 
business functions—helping higher education institutions remain competitive 
nationally and globally.

“Higher education is going through massive changes. With the shift in 
financial models, globalization, and online educational offerings, past 
approaches for acquiring and using technologies are simply too slow and 
costly. There are too many expenses, too much overhead and too much 
administration,” said Shelton Waggener, senior vice president, Internet2. 
“The technology available to our community today gives us the opportunity to 
tailor cloud solutions to meet our communities specific needs while making 
them available to all our members simultaneously with minimal additional work 
per campus. Cloud technologies, like Instructure’s Canvas Learning Management 
Systems, Box’s collaboration platform, or Splunk’s big data tool set, are 
delivered through an approach enabling the next generation of research and 
education to occur at Internet2 speeds. The tech community is realizing big 
opportunities that our combined efforts bring."

Box, a leading Silicon Valley cloud service provider partnered with Internet2 
and member campuses including Stanford, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and 
Notre Dame beginning the fall of 2011 to offer U.S. universities a secure and 
simple way to deploy Box across their entire campus communities. Box’s cloud 
collaboration service helps undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and 
staff access, share and manage content online and from mobile devices. 

“Universities are moving away from their legacy systems and instead want 
technology that mimics what students have become accustomed to in their 
personal lives,” said Whitney Bouck, general manager of enterprise at Box. 
“By joining forces with Internet2, higher education communities can now 
benefit from simple content sharing and collaboration in the cloud, making it 
easy for teams to work, learn and collaborate in new ways.”

“More and more technology providers are discovering the value of working with 
our members to identify effective solutions to campus challenges and the best 
methods to quickly scale services that benefit teaching, learning and 
research,” said Internet2 CEO and President H. David Lambert. “No other 
national organization offers this level of collaboration between higher 
education and the technology industry to launch our strategic cloud and 
advanced networking services. Our new office allows us to be closer to our 
West Coast members and technology leaders, as together, we advance the 
research, innovation and education missions of our nation's leading 
universities."

Internet2’s new West Coast office, which offers free video conferencing and 
office space to all Internet2 members and their leadership, is located at 
6001 Shellmound St., Suite 850, Emeryille, CA 94608. Internet2’s other 
offices are located in Ann Arbor, Michigan; Washington, D.C.; and New York 
City.

About Internet2

Internet2® is a member-owned advanced technology community founded by the 
nation's leading higher education institutions in 1996. Internet2 provides a 
collaborative environment for U.S. research and education organizations to 
solve common technology challenges, and to develop innovative solutions in 
support of their educational, research, and community service missions. For 
more information, visit www.internet2.edu.

To arrange an interview about higher education and the technology industry 
partnering, media should contact Todd Sedmak of Internet2 at 202-331-5373 or 
.

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