Student Transportation Inc. Chooses EarthLink's Cloud Workspace and Cloud Hosting to Support Rapidly Growing IT Infrastructure and Create Secure Cloud Environment

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Sep 25, 2013, 09:44 ET

ATLANTA, Sept. 25, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- EarthLink, Inc. (NASDAQ: ELNK), a leading IT and communications provider, today announced that New Jersey and Barrie Ontario-based Student Transportation, Inc. (STI),a major North American provider of student school bus transportation services, selected EarthLink Cloud Workspace^® and Cloud Hosting for a customized, cloud-based IT infrastructure. STI will leverage this virtual infrastructure to control numerous applications, extend secure access to employees on any device at any location, rapidly fold in new customers and acquisitions, and easily satisfy its audit requirements.

STI is featured in EarthLink's complimentary whitepaper entitled, The Total Benefits of Partnership: A New Way to Look at Cloud-based Desktop and Application Management. Click here to download the whitepaper.

With 10,000 employees and 1 million students transported daily, STI is one of the largest providers of student busing services, operating 10,000 vehicles and serving more than 250 school districts throughout the U.S. and Canada. In the past few years, STI has acquired more than 40 companies and rapidly grown its portfolio of customers, giving STI a coast-to-coast national footprint.

To keep students safe and its business profitable, STI employs advanced technology such as buses equipped with GPS and mobile surveillance video systems. EarthLink's Cloud Workspace is a customized cloud environment that supports the more than 60 applications needed to run STI's operations, and helps enable the company's rapid growth to distributed locations. The STI team simply uploads the acquired company's data and applications, integrating them into STI's tech ecosystem, and then presents them in the cloud environment, avoiding integration complexities. With Cloud Workspace, STI's IT team controls its applications from a central location, extending secure, reliable access to employees on any device at any location.

"EarthLink Cloud Workspace enables us to incorporate 60 business applications into our cloud infrastructure – a feat companies many times our size cannot match," said Keith Engelbert, CTO-Investor Relations, STI. "What started as a cost-saving IT project quickly blossomed into something much bigger as we realized the cloud could be a major business enabler for us."

As STI continues to diversify its business model, the company also chose EarthLink's Cloud Hosting to run its new SchoolWheels Direct program, a recently launched fee-based busing system direct to parents. SchoolWheels Direct runs in the cloud out of EarthLink's data centers, including the new STI application, SafeStop™, a mobile app for parents and school districts to securely monitor SchoolWheels vehicles while en route to and from school. Additional features include a custom Alert Notification System that can be used to communicate weather, traffic, emergency and other safety information in real-time.

Utilizing Cloud Workspace also provides STI with a tremendous advantage in meeting compliance requirements by eliminating the challenge of auditing multiple locations, because all applications are hosted in an EarthLink data center with SSAE 16 compliant process controls and infrastructure. With Cloud Workspace, STI avoids millions in IT costs, and allocates less than one percent of its revenue to IT operations, while the industry-wide average is 3.5 percent. Click here to read the STI case study.

EarthLink Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing Michael D. Toplisek said, "As a growing, publicly-traded company, STI took advantage of the cost-savings and convenience of the Cloud and how Cloud Workspace simplifies audits and IT operations. Cloud Workspace is also proving a key competitive differentiator for them, as STI's speed to integrate new clients and strategic acquisitions makes them an even more agile competitor. Clients often find that Cloud Workspace is not just an IT strategy, but a tremendously strategic business advantage."

About EarthLink

EarthLink, Inc. (NASDAQ: ELNK) is a leading IT services and communications provider to more than 150,000 businesses and one million consumers nationwide. EarthLink empowers customers with managed services including cloud computing, managed and private cloud, and virtualization services such as managed hosting and cloud workspace. EarthLink also offers a robust portfolio of IT security, application hosting, colocation and IT support services. The company operates an extensive network spanning 29,421 route fiber miles with 90 metro fiber rings and 8 secure data centers providing ubiquitous nationwide data and voice IP service coverage across more than 90 percent of the country. Founded in 1994, EarthLink's award-winning reputation for outstanding service and product innovation is supported by an experienced team of professionals focused on best-in-class customer care. For more information, visit EarthLink's website at www.earthlink.com.

About Student Transportation

Founded in 1997, Student Transportation Inc. is North America's third-largest and most progressive provider of school bus transportation services, operating more than 9,500 vehicles. Student Transportation's family of local companies delivers safe, reliable and cost-effective transportation solutions to school districts throughout the U.S. and Canada. Services are delivered by drivers, dispatchers, maintenance technicians, terminal managers and others who are caring members of their local communities. For more information, please visit www.rideSTBus.com.

Cloud Workspace is a registered trademark of MRK Networks inc, dba independenceIT.®

SOURCE EarthLink