DHS Releases Continuous Monitoring RFQ:  In cybersecurity news, DHS, working through GSA, released a final RFQ this week seeking bids to meet requirements  of the new Continuous Diagnostic and Mitigation program and for continuous monitoring as-a-service.  The BPA includes 15 tools and 11 task areas aimed at improving DHS’s IT security.  The BPA has an estimated value of $6 billion and responses are due January 28, 2013. Federal News Radio has the details.

PSIG Members Featured in 10^th Anniversary of the E-Gov Act Event:  This week marked the 10^th anniversary of the E-Gov Act and SIIA PSIG Members Doug Bourgeois of VMware, Mark Forman of Government Transaction Services and David Mihalchik of Google all were featured prominently in the event marking the anniversary.  Other SIIA members were included as well, including Dan Chenok of IBM and former Congressman Tom Davis, now of Deloitte.  C Span covered the event, which focused on the advances made in government technology since passage of the E-Gov Act.  See the video here.

 Appian Receives FISMA Moderate Certification from GSA:  Appian announced this week that it had received FISMA moderate certification from the General Services Administration for a major business process management application, built on Appian Cloud.  Appian Cloud is built on Amazon Web Services.  See the press release for more information.

Federal News Radio to host live chat with CBP CIO:  Our friends at Federal News Radio are hosting a live chat on January 3^rd at 11am with DHS Customs and Border Protection CIO Charlie Armstrong and are encouraging interested parties to submit questions in advance.  See the link for more details.

Michael Hettinger is VP for the Public Sector Innovation Group (PSIG) at SIIA. Follow his PSIG tweets at @SIIAPSIG.

  Name: Gunnar Hellekson
  Title: Chief Technology Strategist
Company: Red Hat

Gunnar Hellekson is the Chief Technology Strategist for Red Hat’s US Public Sector group, where he works with systems integrators and government agencies to encourage the use of open source software in government. He is co-chair of Open Source for America and one of Federal Computer Week’s Fed 100 for 2010. He is also an active member of the Military Open Source working group, the Freedom 2 Connect Technical Council, New America’s California Civic Innovation Project Advisory Council, and the CivicCommons Board of Advisors. He is especially interested in cross-domain security, edge innovation, and interagency collaboration through the open source model.

Home town: Honolulu, Hawaii

First job: Slaving away on an AS/400 for Louis Vuitton’s Honolulu operation when I was in high school.

What are you currently reading? “Industry and Empire”, by E.J. Hobsbawn

All-time favorite music: Reggae. I’m from Hawaii, so that’s mandatory.

What is the best meal you have had recently? The “Heather” from Taco Deli in Austin.

What is your next (dream) career? I’m doing it right now.

Hobbies: My wife, my dog, and fancy cocktails.

What do you think is the hot button issue for the software & services industry going into 2013? The elimination of customization and craftwork, and the introduction of standardization and automation.

Rhianna: Welcome to SIIA! Tell me a little about LiquidPlanner and what makes you unique in the Project Management market.

Liz: LiquidPlanner is unique because it is the only project management software to offer a bold new approach to scheduling. We call it “priority-based scheduling,” and it’s not only easier, but also far more accurate than traditional project management solutions based on the Gantt chart. Our robust scheduling engine actually automates much of the manual work that traditionally falls to project managers. In fact, our customers report their teams save an average of 16 hours a month from the automation benefits provided by LiquidPlanner.

Here’s how it works. In LiquidPlanner, you give tasks “best case / worst case” estimates and put them in priority order. Then LiquidPlanner automatically calculates for you an expected completion date for each task and for the project as a whole, based on who the work is assigned to and how much availability they have. Unlike other project management solutions, LiquidPlanner does not allow you to overbook a team member, so the results are based on real world availability of resources. Because projects and tasks are prioritized in rank order, you can instantly see when a change to one project impacts another – something that is impossible with most other tools.

LiquidPlanner also offers time tracking, collaboration, analytics, mobile apps, and more, all delivered through the cloud. We launched the company in 2008 and have over 1,200 customers in 50+ countries worldwide, many of whom are software, IT, and creative organizations.

Rhianna: How do you think the Project Management space has evolved in the last 3-5 years and what trends are driving that evolution?

Liz: The general proliferation of SaaS-based business tools has been transformative for the project management industry. Shared, collaborative systems are now the norm, in contrast to the time just a few years ago when the project manager alone held the keys to the castle. It’s resulting in a new “democratization of project data,” where information on workload, estimation accuracy, and tracking is now available to all members of the team. That means team members can get a barometric read on their own performance relative to others, not to mention better insight into their own contributions, areas for improvement, and roadmap of responsibility. Now, the onus is on vendors to provide solutions that are easier to use, so each team member themselves can update the project workspace without the need for a specialized project manager in the IT department. The trend of SaaS-based project management also means executives are getting unprecedented visibility into capacity and their ability to deliver products and services. I think you’ll see more and more businesses reporting internal cost savings from smarter project management tools.

Rhianna: You do a lot to ensure security and support with your solution. Can you tell us a little about the measure you take to ensure overall security and support of your solutions?

Liz: One of the great things about the SaaS model is that software providers live and die by the quality of service they offer. Naturally, we go to great lengths to ensure end-to-end security and reliability, from authenticating every user account via email to using SSL technology for server authentication and data encryption. We manage our own servers at a world-class data center here in Seattle. In addition to tight physical security measures, it’s architected to protect against hardware and software failure with redundant power and internet connections, hot failover servers, nightly off-site data backups, and 24/7/365 monitoring.

Rhianna: You recently took over the CEO position, having previously held the COO role at LiquidPlanner. What is your vision for the future of the company?

Liz: It’s an incredibly exciting time at LiquidPlanner. We’re really entering the second era of LiquidPlanner’s life as a company. The first five years were dedicated to R&D – we set out to tackle a really big, hard problem and disrupt an old and stagnant market. During this period, we essentially bootstrapped the company to profitability and established a loyal customer base around the world. Today, LiquidPlanner has more than 1,100 paying customers in 50 countries across multiple industries and the company was named one of “Washington’s Best WorkPlaces” by the Puget Sound Business Journal. The next phase for LiquidPlanner is all about driving the company’s growth and extending our platform. We see so many opportunities to help teams tackle increasingly complex projects in today’s competitive business environment, and we are investing heavily in social productivity innovation to meet this growing demand. My vision is that LiquidPlanner becomes a component of the must-have business software toolkit for businesses of all sizes, alongside industry leaders like Salesforce, Zendesk, and Box. We’re lucky to be doing business in a time when innovation, quality, and service are rewarded – on those grounds we are very solid. I’m extremely bullish on the future.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.

Rhianna: Tell me about Recurly. What makes your billing management solution unique?

Dan: Recurly was designed from day one to provide a subscription billing management as a ‘self-serve’ offering. Every single design decision since the first day had this approach in mind – from our application architecture, to our APIs, our interface design and even our pricing and overall transparency of our service. This has afforded us a tremendous competitive advantage, because our application itself is our greatest sales tool. In our business, establishing trust with our customers is a very large part of customer acquisition, and there is no better way to quickly accomplish that than by NOT hiding anything, and by delighting our customers within the first 60 seconds after signup.

Rhianna: You have been particularly successful aligning yourself with strong channel partners. What makes a strong channel partner for Recurly and why are these partnerships core to your business?

Dan: Recurring billing is a painful thing for companies to get set up and operating smoothly. We do everything we can to eliminate payments-related jargon, and to reduce the amount of time and effort required to deliver value to our customers. Our customers are able to go live in days, rather than months required from other enterprise solutions. For channel partners, this means that our service can also be resold very easily because it is designed to be a ‘light-touch, high velocity’ sale.

We have found two distinct kinds of channel partners to date:

1.  Marketplaces – [Ex. Recurly powers billing for Salesforce's AppExchange Checkout] https://vimeo.com/40358739
2. Merchant Services Providers – [Ex. Recurly is partnered with TSYS, which has hundreds of salespeople seeking to solve problems for merchants on a daily basis]

The best channel partners are those that share a common passion for helping our mutual customers succeed. In addition, the best partnerships tend to emerge out of a ‘value-sharing’ disposition, rather than a ‘value-capture’ mindset. We always seek to align ourselves with companies that value relationships and show a willingness to invest in growing them over time.

Rhianna: You refer to your solution as “bought not sold”, a formula many other companies would love to have. Did you ever think it would take this direction when you founded the company?

Dan: As a ‘Pay-As-You-Go’ service, we don’t require our customers to enter into long-term, unpleasant contracts. This creates a very different construct from the very early stages of the conversation. For example, if a customer has a set of requirements that we cannot support, we are the first to acknowledge that. We’d rather lose the business than sign up a customer that will be disappointed 60 days later.
By offering Recurly on a month-to-month, pay-as-you-go model, we know that if we disappoint our customers on any level, they are free to leave us at any time. (In fact, one of our core promises to our customers is that we will make it easy to migrate should they ever decide to leave us. We never hold their data hostage – and this only accelerates our goodwill with our customers). This immediately engenders trust because it shows that we have confidence in our offering, and we have nothing to hide. There is a bit of an implied guarantee to our customers with this approach.

Many of our original customers are now getting acquired by larger companies, or individuals are moving to senior posts within new companies, and their positive opinions of Recurly are being carried with them. This is very pleasing to see customer goodwill working as our most effective marketing tool.

Rhianna: Is it true that you can get subscriptions up and running on a website in just days? Even with custom integrations?

Dan: Our customers move from sign-up to production on average in less than a week. Highly customized integrations require several weeks at most. We provide tools to easily integrate PCI compliant checkout forms into our customers’ websites. When publicly traded companies come to us, their legal teams require more time to review documents than it takes developers and product people to get ready for launch.

Rhianna: There is a lot of competition in the subscription billing space today. Where do you think this market is headed in the next 12-18 months?

Dan: The market is growing incredibly quickly. With the costs of storage, bandwidth and computing power all declining together, the distribution model for applications and services has naturally followed suit. With this change in the distribution model, pricing models have naturally evolved towards ‘pay-as-you-go’, (subscription or recurring) billing models. In this new world, you pay for what you consume, or ‘pay to play’.

Cloud and SaaS services are by definition offered on a ‘pay-as-you-go’ basis. Digital content, media, and entertainment are also increasingly offered on either a ‘pay per download’ or subscription basis.

Purchasing psychology of consumers has also evolved. As recently as 5-10 years ago, companies felt that they had to own every last aspect of their own operations in house. During this same era, we were also still buying music CDs in music stores and storing them on our shelves.

Today, companies are increasingly comfortable with ‘renting’ capacity via cloud services, along with renting ‘expertise’ that simply isn’t cost-effective to own internally. Subscription billing fits into this latter category. When you consider the total cost of ownership for enduring PCI audits, as well as the enterprise risk of storing customer credit cards, this category becomes one of the first areas to be considered for outsourcing to experts.

We couldn’t be more excited about this market opportunity and the overall future for Recurly.

Rhianna Collier is VP for the Software Division at SIIA.

Companies are looking for ways to drive lasting marketplace advantage, with innovation becoming the key driver of business success. In this pre-recorded webcast, Vanessa Alvarez, Cloud Thought Leader & Director of Product Marketing at Gridstore talks with Lauren States, Vice President, CTO, IBM Corporate Strategy in an interview format.  They explore how cloud and this new era of computing is fostering innovation and changing the structure of businesses and markets, and how the use of cloud technologies can enable IT to move out of the data center and into the fabric of the business.

About the Presenters:

Lauren States
As Vice President, Technology Strategy, Growth Initiatives and CTO for Cloud Computing on the IBM Corporate Strategy team, Lauren is responsible for the technology strategy for IBM’s growth initiatives, including cloud computing, Smarter Planet, business analytics and emerging markets. In her previous role in the IBM Software Group, Lauren engaged directly with clients to deliver leading edge cloud solutions globally. She joined IBM as a systems engineer after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School.

Vanessa Alvarez
Vanessa Alvarez is the director of product marketing and an accomplished technology professional. Alvarez focuses on the go to market strategy for Gridstore’s award winning solution, the Grid. Previously, Alvarez was an analyst with Forrester Research, focused on next generation enterprise infrastructure and emerging technologies. She advised Fortune 500 enterprises on how to best leverage their IT environment to enable their competitive advantage, through the deployment of emerging technologies and operational models.

Five takeaways from the webinar:

1. Do not think of China as one homogenous market. The country is geographically diverse, and each region is, in effect, its own market. In addition to geographical segmentation, there are differences between schools and grades, as well as between institutions and informal learning outside of school. Much of the purchasing is done on a local level, and large scale purchases by provinces is not common.




2. English language learning is a huge market in China. There are approximately the same number of English speakers in China as there are in the US.  China and the United States are becoming more intertwined and shared language exchange is key in the view of many Chinese.




3. Among the biggest drivers in the Chinese market are parents. With the one child policy and other cultural norms, it is common that parents will invest their own resources heavily in their child’s education.  These investments include private schooling (in the US and China) as well as heavy investment in after school study tools and programs.




4. Tablets are increasingly popular in China because of their lower price point and enhanced capabilities, but infrastructure is the more challenging part of the equation.  Finding quality content to place on the tablets is increasingly important.




5. In the near future, 70% of the population of China will be urban, causing stress on city schools and infrastructure and forcing options for distance and computer-based learning to become more common.

The SIIA Global Working group produces country specific webinars on a regular basis to expand SIIA members’ knowledge of global trends in education.  Any SIIA member interested in learning more about the China market or any prior spotlight country should visit our webinar archive.

Lindsay Harman is Market and Policy Analyst for the SIIA Education Division.

What is the first round review?

For the first round review, two judges review each product in each category. For example, products nominated in two categories will be assigned four judges. During this first round, judges participate in product demonstration s given by the nominees. Two options are available for the products demonstrations:

– Live product demonstration: Nominations walk through their product webinar-style with the judges participating as they do the walk-through

– Recorded product demonstration: Nominees may already have a video product demo that can be sent to the judges to watch.

We recommend that the nominees keep the demos to under an hour. If it is a live demo, remember to leave time for Q&A with the judges.

The first round review also includes product access. It’s beneficial for the judges to get a feel for the product on their own, as a supplement to the guided demo. Product access can happen in several forms, including temporary online login information or by sending the physical product to the judge.

I also suggest sending as much additional information as you would like to the judges. This can be additional links to PDF’s, videos, news releases, etc.

Who are the judges?

We take great care in selecting the industry experts who volunteer as judges. Each division reviews every judge application to determine if he/she is qualified. We want to ensure there are no conflicts of interest.

For our software and content categories, the judges consist of industry executives and analysts, members of the media, bloggers, investors, and even some customers.
For our education categories, we use educators and administrators as our judges. They are the users of these products and can best determine what products may work the best in their classrooms.

Judging is a great experience because it gives the customers a chance to review the products and provide feedback that the companies can use to make improvements.

How can you help?

We are still looking for judges in several of our categories in Content, Software, and Education. If you are interested in judging or can recommend a colleague please complete our brief judge application.

__________________________________________________________________________________________________

Wendy Tanner is CODiE Awards Coordinator. Follow the CODiE Awards on Twitter @CODiEAwards

The project was funded by the Gates Foundation, and the research was conducted by Gartner, Inc. in collaboration with the American Association of School Administrators (AASA) and the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN). The project has 5 major deliverables coming in the future months; see the Closing the Gap: Turning Data Into Action website for more information.

The project solicited input from many school districts and teachers around the country to get an on the ground view of the how LMS (Learning Management Systems) and SIS (Student Information Systems) are being implemented and used. It also provided information on how vendors can best work with districts to improve their usage.

Five takeaways from the webinar:

1. Teachers, as the end user of most of the systems, need to have a role in the selection and implementation of both SIS and LMS platforms (as well as other technologies designed for their use).  But the survey found that most often is not the case. When asked about the district LMS or SIS, teachers often do not know the difference or even their purpose. Those that do know often are underutilizing the systems and using only basic functionalities such as grade reporting.
2. Students & Parents want to have access to individual student data tracking progress and grades.  Several studies have shown that giving students access to their individual grades and allowing them to track progress produces better results.
3. Integration and multi-device platforms are essential.  Schools, districts, and teachers want to be able to access the data from any location and device. There is also critical need for  interoperability  so that different applications work together to share data.
4. Educators agree that the traditional model is not working anymore.  The industrialized classroom is poised for change.
5. Predictive and/or prescriptive analysis in systems is key. Presenting and summarizing data is insufficient, and SIS, LMS and related technologies must provide actionable information. The importance of improving student activities and system use is high, and the systems need to produce outputs that can either predict positive changes or prescribe them when needed.

The project leaders conclude that the overall the impact of SIS and LMS systems in school districts has great possibility, but is under-delivering due to challenges with product features, selection and implementation.  The webinar and project resources provide much more information on the role of data collection and include helpful links, templates, and charts detailing the features of market-leading products. SIIA members who want to learn more can view the webinar or download the slides on SIIA’s webinar archive site.

Lindsay Harman is Market and Policy Analyst for the SIIA Education Division.

My October 16 oral testimony is provided below and video archived (at 02:02:40):

On behalf of the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) and our 500 high-tech companies, thank you for inviting me today. I am Mark Schneiderman, SIIA’s senior director of education policy.

SIIA agrees with the Commission that, “Future generations of students cannot compete unless we dramatically reform our education system.”

Our industrial-age education practices are largely unchanged over a century or more:
- Too many students are disengaged, not due to lack of technology, but from undifferentiated resources, rote one-to-many instruction, and lack of attention to 21st century skills.
- Time and place are constants, but learning is variable.

Instead, our education system must be fundamentally reengineered from a mass production, teaching model to a student-centered, personalized learning model to address the dramatic change in student daily lives, diversity and expectations.

The mandate is not for marginal change, but for: redesign to free learning from the physical limitations of time, place and paper; and instead customize instructional resources, strategies, and schedules to dynamically address each student’s unique abilities, interests and needs.

The redesign of education can take place without technology and digital learning, but not at scale.  Technology is a teaching force multiplier and a learning accelerator.

This doesn’t mean computers replace teachers, or that all learning takes place online.

It does mean that we use the technology:
1. to collect and analyze extensive student learning data to a degree not otherwise possible;
2. to provide a differentiation of interactive, multimedia teaching and learning resources and student creativity and collaboration tools not possible from one teacher, book or classroom; and
3. to free teacher time from rote and administrative activities to redirect to more value-added instruction.

The result is a more effective teacher, a more highly engaged and better performing learner, and a more productive system.

SIIA’s 2012 Vision K-20 Survey of 1,600 educators found that interest in digital learning is high at about 75%, but only about 25% rate actual technology access and use as high by their peers and institutions.

Here are 10 SIIA recommendations to the Commission and state:

1. Eliminate the Carnegie unit (credit for seat time) as the measure of learning and replace it with a competency-based model that provides credit, progression and graduation based upon demonstrated mastery and performance.

2. Eliminate fixed, agrarian-age definitions of the hours of the school day and the days of the school year and instead provide flexibility for 24/7/365 learning as needed for student mastery.

3. Ensure all teachers have access to a minimum slate of digital tools and supports provided to other professionals, including instructional technology coaches and virtual peer learning networks.

4. Ensure all educators have the skills needed to personalize learning and leverage technology, including by updating the curriculum of teachers colleges as well as teacher licensure and certification requirements.

5. Encourage and support a shift from print-only curriculum to instead provide students with anytime, everywhere access to interactive digital content and online learning.

6. Create a statewide online learning authority for approval and oversight of virtual learning providers to New York students and schools, and loosen arbitrary limits.

7. Invest to ensure equity of technology and digital learning access to change the education cost-curve and provide opportunity to learn, while providing increased local flexibility in the use of state grant funds to meet unique local needs.

8. Set minimum expectations for school/teacher electronic communication with parents and families and support home access to student performance data, assignments and curriculum.

9. Support more flexible higher education policies that end seat-time requirements, allow students to demonstrate prior learning and complete course modules that fit their learning gaps, and receive student aid for study toward skills certifications valued in the job market.

10. Finally, recognize the role of the private sector, which invests hundreds of millions of dollars each year to develop and deliver educational technologies and digital learning. Support public-private research partnerships, and reform the RFP process to enable the private sector to share their expertise, vision and innovative business models.

Our nation’s continued success will require that our educational system adopt modern methods and means to remain not effective and relevant in the 21st century.

On behalf of SIIA and our member high-tech companies, I look forward to working with the Commission to further identify and advance a reform plan for New York education.

Mark Schneiderman is Senior Director of Education Policy at SIIA.

Tell us a little about the history of Education categories in the CODiE Awards.

The first year of the CODiE Awards, the one education winner was Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, for the Best Learning Product. It was such a popular product, and I remember later on there were spin-off products, and even one called Where in North Dakota is Carmen Sandiego! It’s interesting because even today, Carmen Sandiego is still a product at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Even after a series of acquisitions and mergers, the company is marketing and selling an updated version of this product, decades later. The point is that a good education product with a good instructional design that changes with the hardware capabilities is going to have longevity and certainly, branding. It’s very possible that the teachers who are buying Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego today could have used the product when they were young. The CODiE Awards are in its 28th year and it’s amazing to think about how the very first education CODiE Award winner is not only in the market, but has her own Facebook page.

Why do educators and administrators judge all of the education categories in the first round of judging?

The Education Division wanted to have educators and administrators review the products in the first round because they are the real experts. They know what other products are out there, and they have probably used a number of different products in their category, so they have the expertise. They are the best judge of what is going to work in the classroom, and that is a big part of what we mean when we say a product is the best.

The Education Division is able to leverage its relationships with the professional associations and online education communities such as edWeb to reach the teachers. We partner with them because they can directly reach out to their members. For example, SIIA cosponsors a games channel on edWeb, so we can reach teachers who are active in the games-for-learning community. That community helps us find those educators who would be the best at judging the games category.

Why do you like having three top awards, for Best PK-12, Best Postsecondary, and Best Overall?

First of all, I think it’s very special to have some very high-level categories where companies don’t nominate but they are recognized. It’s a very special recognition. It’s a way to pull out the best of the best. In some sense we are following other awards programs. In the Oscars, they have lots of awards, but the most exciting one is Best Picture of the Year. We know that the winners have appreciated that award.

Why do so many education companies love to nominate for the CODiE Awards?

The number of products that are out there in the market have grown substantially for over 25 years. It’s followed the growth of technology, as schools have started to move from the use of print materials and transitioned to the use of digital. Twenty-five years ago, using Carmen Sandiego was a very unique and probably isolated event by a few special teachers who were excited about using that Apple II in the classroom. As access to hardware increased, the software market evolved, and professional development supported technology integration, educators and administrators started to see the benefits of using technology. They saw student engagement, and positive results. The market grew, and as the market grew, the CODiE Award nominations grew, the interest grew, and school budgets grew. It has been a consistent, steady growth for 25 years.

Many of the products that were submitted in the first 10 years for the CODiE Awards had been developed by teachers. Teachers themselves then ended up forming companies. Jan Davidson was a Language Arts English teacher. She wrote a program called Reading Blaster for kids to use in her classrooms on an Apple II. She started sharing it with other teachers, and her husband, Bob Davidson, decided that there might be a business in selling that program to other teachers. They formed a company called Davidson & Associates, which was an early member of the then SPA (Software Publishers Association.) I like knowing that some of the educators reviewing this year’s products may be designing a product that could be a CODiE Awards winner in a few years. It could be the next Carmen Sandiego or Oregon Trail!

Which category are you most excited about this year?

I’m always anxious to see who is nominating in brand new categories. This year, our new category is Best Personalized Learning Solution, which evolved from work we have been doing in the Education Division for the last several years. It started with a working group on personalized learning after our Education Board undertook this as a key initiative. Personalized learning is a new market. Legacy companies can incorporate those attributes as they modify their products, and so can the startups who are designing new products. The thing I look forward to most is seeing nominations come in from companies I don’t know yet. There are so many new companies each year, and some are so new I haven’t even heard from them. When I see their nominations come in, I go to their website and find out about them, and it makes me excited about the direction that education technology is taking.

How can small companies compete in the CODiE Awards?

I think that the small companies with brand new products are viewed very positively by judges. The judges like seeing something new. It’s great to see the start-ups getting the same amount of visibility as larger companies when the finalists are announced. And when the SIIA member companies vote in the second round of judging, every company gets the same number of votes in each category, no matter what size they are. When all of the winners are listed on the press release, some will be large companies, some will be small companies. Some will be companies educators will recognize, and some will be totally unknown. Hopefully when people see a winner they’ve never heard of, they will go to their website and check them out.

What makes the education CODiE Awards banquet so special?

We have so much fun at our awards banquet! It’s a very special event for our companies. They enjoy it. It’s another thing to look forward to at the Ed Tech Industry Summit. We held the gala for the 2012 CODiE Awards on the second evening of the conference and will continue the tradition in 2013.

It’s funny, before I worked at SIIA, I worked at various member companies for 15 years. I came to many of the conferences and even spoke at them, but I never attended a CODiE Awards event! I’m not sure why. The first CODiE Awards gala I ever went to was the first year I started working for SIIA in 2002-in fact it was my second day on the job! I discovered how much fun it was, and how special it is. I really have had fun every year since.