One Solution Helps District Support
Two Platforms

Profiles in Success: ABC Unified School District

Cerritos, CA — Computer users often assume that Macs and PCs are worlds apart. But district administrators from the ABC Unified School District (ABCUSD) recently discovered a powerful, cost-saving secret: By implementing Xserve hardware and Parallels software, they can manage all of the computers in all 29 of their schools, whether those computers are Mac- or Windows-based. This back-end solution allows them to meet the needs of all educators, yet maintain a system that can be managed and supported by a small staff. And, even as the district has adopted standards, over 20,000 students and 2500 staff members retain their choice of a computing environment — with an Apple solution everyone agrees is as easy as ABC.

In the spring of 2007 ABCUSD launched a five-year, $5 million technology refresh program, aimed at replacing all instructional computers. Over the course of the program, ABCUSD will add approximately 1000 new computers each year. The district’s information technology (IT) department was committed to supporting all computer users, without making platform choice an issue. Also, the IT staff wished to allow schools to self-determine which platform to integrate into their teaching and learning.

“Our number one goal was to support a dual-platform environment,” says Colin Sprigg, ABCUSD’s director of information and technology. “We had this opportunity to build an infrastructure, and we wanted to standardize it throughout the district. Whatever we did, it had to work in all of our schools.”

Podcast Touts Parallels

During the year that Sprigg and his team were evaluating possible technology solutions, he happened to listen to an episode of Gibson Research Corporation’s popular Security Now! podcasts. In the program, Sprigg learned about the Parallels product's high performance, which enables Mac users to run Windows programs.

Says Sprigg, “I heard about the great reviews that Parallels got, and how fast it was. We started talking more seriously about how that might work on a server, then just decided, ‘Let’s buy a server and try it.’”

Next Page: Pilot Implementation Demonstrates Success