Project Brief

Ithaka is our longest running client. Our continuous relationship has spanned over 7 years and we’re thrilled to say that there is no end in sight.
Ithaka is a not-for-profit organization that works with the global higher education community to advance and preserve knowledge and to improve teaching and learning through the use of digital technologies. Ithaka’s JSTOR service, a cloud-based library, was launched in 1997 is where scholars, students, and the public can access thousands of journals, books, images, and other content as well as tools that promote research, teaching, sharing, and contribution. JSTOR includes content from over 1,000 publishers and serves 6 million unique monthly visitors, 11,000 universities, schools, and institutions in 176 countries.

What They Needed

In the face of increasing competition from commercial companies, productOps was engaged to build an entirely new delivery platform for JSTOR. The solution needed to be accessible, transparent, easy to operate, and scalable as student access fluctuated and products changes or were added daily. It was critical that the platform be secure and handle large amounts of traffic and AWS fit the bill perfectly.

The Solution

After a comprehensive discovery and strategy phase, a team that flexed between 8 – 15 people embarked on a 3 year phased-implementation project. There was no big bang switchover and no interruption of service. The only thing users noticed was improved response times. In addition to software engineering and skills transfer there was considerable organization development / change management involved to ensure that the organization was tooled to be able to take the best possible advantage of the system that was being built.