Situational Summary
Academic Partnerships is an e-learning company based out of Dallas, TX. Founded in 2007, this 800+ person company deploys technologies and tools that help their higher education customers expand their online degree programs.
They do this through their integrated product AP HigherEdge, where clients enjoy 1) High-quality, low-tuition online programs 2) Optimal faculty-forward program design 3) Accelerated speed-to-market launch 4) Vertically integrated, data-driven marketing performance 5) Seamless dedication to student retention and success
The numbers are impressive: 50+ colleges and universities, 5,200+ faculty members, bringing online 5,400+ courses, spanning 650+ undergraduate/graduate degree programs, engaging 270,000+ students.
Academic Partnerships need to expand their engineering capacity to meet growing demand. Most urgent is to grow the engineering team for a pending acquisition: a SaaS company (Coursetune) that relies on a distributed team of six engineers located in Europe and North Africa. The idea is to add 12 engineers to this new acquisition over the next six months, with the initial group starting in October if at all possible.
The tech stack will be focused around Haxe, Node.js, PostgreSQL, manual QA (moving to Selenium), and DevOps. Academic Partnerships will be hiring a PM and Scrum Master soon to lead the team. The vision is to have this new, external teamwork as an extension of the in-house group. It would be nice if the Service Provider had previous education experience but it is not critical. No specific certifications are required but it is worth discussing if CSMs were available. It is expected that all team members will speak English fluently.
There is only interest in considering Service Providers located in either Latin America or Eastern Europe. Academic Partnerships does have experience outsourcing, working with two groups in India (Genpact, Happiest Minds) to various degrees of success.
Academic Partnerships has talked to 4 groups so far: Globant, Arion Koder, Full Stack Labs, Global Logic. While each has individual strengths, there is a need to understand if better-aligned groups are out there: ones that will more assuredly meet the needs of this immediate opportunity and that of Academic Partnerships, generally.
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Accelerance has considered your objectives and partner selection criteria in the context of all members in the Accelerance Global Partner Network. Given your declared needs and objectives, Accelerance is delighted to introduce the below Certified Partners as our top aligned choices to work as a dedicated Partner.
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