Wednesday, June 8, 2011

New England CIO Innovation Awards: Enterprise

ConnectEDU's Blaisdell turned to the cloud to simplify infrastructure and grow

By James M. Connolly

Rick Blaisdell
Chief technology officer, ConnectEDU
Education: Bachelor of science in computer engineering from Northeastern University.
Extra: In one “geeky electronics class” he built a notch filter that allowed him to turn a light on and off by clapping hands, even before The Clapper came out.
Quote: There’s continued optimization and tuning to reduce those prices. The end game is to build better products and solutions for the education industry.


Rick Blaisdell  calls himself “a cloud evangelist.” So, it made sense that when he stepped into the lead IT role at Boston’s ConnectEDU two years ago, there was a cloud element in his strategy.

At the heart of CTO Blaisdell’s strategy was the goal of simplifying ConnectEDU’s infrastructure. “Internally we had a lot of IT resources to support the company. There was a lot of infrastructure. When we looked at the external systems there were probably seven different types of technology. One of the problems we had was where you build for what you think will be maximum usage, but 90 percent of the time there was hardly any utilization at all,” said Blaisdell.

Blaisdell was new to the educational sector when he joined ConnectEDU. His background was in the Internet and finance arenas. ConnectEDU offers technology designed to help students graduate from high school, find and enroll in the right college and earn a degree while gaining skills and launching their careers. He said that his experience helped to give ConnectEDU a new view on what technology could do for the company as its business model evolved. Today, ConnectEDU says its network includes 5 million high school and college-aged students, 2,500 high schools, 450 colleges, and nearly 50 employers.

Two key steps helped Blaisdell simplify the company’s infrastructure. First, the entire code base was converted to a common standard, Microsoft Corp. .NET platform. Two years down the road, that project is 90 percent complete. Second, Blaisdell wanted to move to a true cloud model. The company had used Navisite Inc. of Andover for some hosting. “One of the things you didn’t see was a cloud model that had utility-based pricing at the enterprise level. I was talking to them about my vision and they said, ‘We want to show you something under the covers.’ It was the UCS from Cisco,” Blaisdell said. Navisite uses Cisco Systems Inc.’s Unified Computing System in its Managed Cloud Services, which offers enterprise on-demand scalable provisioning of IT services including applications, messaging and collaboration, servers, storage, and networks.

ConnectEDU not only had been experiencing rapid growth in general, it needed to accommodate seasonal demand spikes on applications such as its SuperApp, which helps students assemble materials for college applications. The Navisite/Cisco offering allows Blaisdell to pay utility-style prices — unit prices go down with additional use — while also providing scalability and reliability. “UCS was built from the ground up to be an enterprise offering. It had all the built-in reliability that you need with a cloud offering and coast to coast failover. Not many providers were offering that type of failover. Also, on the Cisco platform you have all of their security,” said Blaisdell.

Having started out as a beta user of UCS in 2009, ConnectEDU now has 95 percent of its operations on the platform, and expects to have 100 percent of those operations on it within six months.

The result has been a 30 percent savings in costs such as hardware, maintenance and hosting. With utility-style pricing and continued optimization of applications and systems management, costs are actually falling.

“There’s continued optimization and tuning to reduce those prices. The end game is to build better products and solutions for the education industry,” noted Blaisdell.

Blaisdell, a North Shore native, admits to having been the type of kid who used to take things apart. He said of his current role, “I like solving problems in the educational industry, and there are a lot of problems to solve. There’s a lot of opportunity for companies to solve all of the problems that learners have throughout the education life cycle.”

Asked about his accomplishments, he credits the ConnectEDU team, saying, “In the past two years what I’ve done with cloud computing — we’re making the company more profitable and simplifying the business. We’ve built the most scalable, reliable, cost-effective education solution on the market. Without a good team we wouldn’t have accomplished anything.”