Blackboard Inc. / BBBB

About Blackboard Inc.

1899 L St. NW, 11th Floor, Washington, D.C. 20036
www.blackboard.com | 202-463-4860 | Founded: 1997

Industry: Information Technology | Category: Top 100 Companies

Blackboard continued to grow and prosper in 2005, its first full year as a publicly traded company, as revenue increased 22 percent and it remained solidly profitable.
Blackboard opened a new data-hosting center in Amsterdam last year and released a new version of its academic software in eight languages. It started a joint-development program with Microsoft Corp. to make its learning software more compatible with Microsoft programs such as Office and SharePoint. The company also expanded its executive staff by hiring business software veteran David Sample as its senior vice president of sales.
Partly to accelerate overseas expansion, the company announced in October it was buying one of its key rivals, WebCT Inc., for $180 million in cash, a transaction that closed in late February of this year. WebCT was much smaller than Blackboard in the United States but had expanded more rapidly overseas, where it drew 28 percent of its revenue, compared with only 16 percent for Blackboard.
In March of this year, the company announced plans to create a series of new Web services to enable more social networking, lifelong learning and instructional-resource sharing among its 3,700 educational clients.

2007 Financial Data

Total employees: 549 | Local employees: 300