REDMOND, Wash. & FOLSOM, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Microsoft Corp. and PowerSchool, a leading provider of K-12 education technology solutions reaching over 30 million students in North America, today announced a new partnership that will bring together PowerSchool’s innovative K-12 technologies with Microsoft’s O365 for Education productivity suite, Windows devices, and cloud infrastructure to help ensure all students reach their full potential.
Aligned around a shared vision that technology in education can help improve a child’s future opportunities, the companies have committed to leveraging their best-in-class solutions to help educators, students and parents achieve their common goal of success in the classroom.
By combining PowerSchool’s award-winning Unified Classroom™ and Student Information System with Microsoft’s productivity suite, Windows devices, and Azure infrastructure, the partnership will create classroom efficiencies, enable collaboration, and provide insights that allow teachers to spend more time teaching and less time focused on administrative tasks. Additionally, students will have the ability to engage with their teachers, other students, and classroom materials in ways that work best for them, and parents will be able to more easily understand and support their child’s progress.
PowerSchool’s customers will also benefit from Microsoft Azure, Microsoft’s secure and intelligent cloud. The partnership involves PowerSchool delivering apps on Azure which enables a high degree of scale and security, while providing a platform to more rapidly deliver innovations.
“At Microsoft, we are working hard every day to give school leaders and educators the tools they need to unlock limitless learning for students, and this new partnership is a big step forward in that vision,” said Eran Megiddo, Corporate Vice President of Education at Microsoft. “Working together, we’ll deliver new solutions that connect PowerSchool’s leading K-12 technology with Microsoft’s cloud productivity and analytics to provide the best teaching and learning solutions for educational institutions to support the students of today in creating the world of tomorrow.”
The partnership will allow Microsoft and PowerSchool to reshape K-12 education in five key areas:
- Creating a unique and enhanced Unified Classroom experience — By embedding Microsoft Office 365, including OneDrive, OneNote, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote Class Notebook into PowerSchool’s Unified Classroom, teachers will be able to manage all aspects of their classroom and use Microsoft Office 365 in one simple solution.
- Providing best-in-class cloud infrastructure — With PowerSchool’s solutions hosted on Microsoft Azure, the partnership will offer advanced security, scalability, and reliability to their cloud solutions.
- Enabling Personalized Learning — The addition of Microsoft’s solutions for education to the PowerSchool Unified Classroom will further empower students with more ways to demonstrate learning, collaborate with others, and personalize their learning experiences. The addition of Azure Machine Learning and Cognitive Services will enable PowerSchool to not only inform the learning process, but also adapt it in real time to meet the needs of each student.
- Providing Valuable Insights — By leveraging a combination of PowerSchool’s Unified Insights platform and Microsoft’s Power BI, the partnership will provide educators with the data they need to gain valuable insights into operational metrics and student performance.
- Creating a community of educators — The partnership is committed to helping the education community by sharing their decades of combined experience to help all educators grow and develop their skills in the classroom.
“At PowerSchool, we’re dedicated to improving K-12 education and ensuring every student has the opportunity to achieve success in the classroom and beyond,” said Hardeep Gulati, PowerSchool CEO. “Microsoft shares our mission to use innovative technologies to deliver transformational educational experiences. By partnering with Microsoft, we can better connect educators, students, and parents, delivering a stronger K-12 experience for all, in a way that is only possible due to our combined expertise.”
PowerSchool and Microsoft will be at multiple conferences throughout the year. See their innovation in action and learn more about the benefits this partnership offers K-12 schools and districts.
About Microsoft
Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) is the leading platform and productivity company for the mobile-first, cloud-first world, and its mission is to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.
About PowerSchool Group LLC
PowerSchool is a leading provider of K-12 education technology solutions that improve the education experience for educators, students, and parents in over 70 countries around the world. We provide the industry’s first Unified Classroom solution, empowering teachers with best-in-class, secure, and compliant online solutions, including student information systems, learning management and classroom collaboration, assessment, analytics, behavior, and special education case management. We streamline school office and administration operations with online solutions for student registration, school choice, and finance/HR/ERP. We drive student growth through digital classroom capabilities and engage families through real-time communications across any device. Visit https://www.powerschool.com/ to learn more.
