As you probably know, we have been tracking if a system is hosted on-premises (self-hosting) or if it is hosted externally, but our to-do list has always had the annoying task of figuring out if the system was managed in a vendor’s data center (managed hosting) or in the cloud (SaaS hosting, often through AWS).
Well, we have finally gotten around to doing it. Blackboard was a great test case to validate our model since the company stated that it has a growing number of Learn SaaS (for their LMS) clients (as seen in Phil’s Post).
So how do we do this?
By simply pinging the URL of the product page, we can get the IP addresses. This helps distinguish if it’s hosted locally or on one of the main cloud hosting companies (Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc). Then, with a little bit of searching, we can find the IP range Blackboard’s Learn SaaS is using.
The graph above contains over 2100 active Blackboard implementations and they are divided as follows:
55% are HigherEd in North America
38% are HigherEd in Rest of the world
7% are K-12 in North America
The world map below shows the breakdown by world regions.
See Phil’s post for more analysis. We now expect to be able to dig deeper, analyzing the connections between Blackboard Learn hosting models and other LMS variables. We are also exploring the ability to do this same categorization for Moodle clients.
