CEO Jim Harold oversees successful strategic pivot to fill marketplace gap, form complementary partnerships and develop new capabilities to meet burgeoning student needs

HOUSTON, September 14, 2021 –

Identity Automation, the digital identity platform for education, recently completed its first year under the leadership of CEO Jim Harold. In just 12 months, the company carved out an exclusive space in the K-12 and higher education IAM marketplace, created significant partnerships and developed new capabilities to meet student and educator needs in remote, hybrid and digital learning environments. The market response has been phenomenal; over the past 12 months, the company added 50 education clients, increased cloud implementations from zero to 40 and grew bookings by 140%. 

The pandemic put K-12 schools and higher education institutions into crisis mode. Educators and their technology teams stepped up, displaying unprecedented resilience and creativity to ensure students could keep learning. After the initial phase of improvisation to manage remote learning, schools needed new solutions to ensure that access to their enlarged digital learning environments is secure, reliable and flexible. Harold and his team made sure RapidIdentity was ready to meet these urgent needs.

To achieve this, Identity Automation expanded its K-12 and higher education focus by adding industry veterans with a combined 100 years of education sector experience to the team, including Engagement Director Jaime Donally, Sales Director Tim Till and Director of Customer Success Larry Wood. Other key hires with deep experience in education have been made across the customer success and sales departments.

Under Harold’s direction, Identity Automation focused on scaling its flagship RapidIdentity platform, offering educators a better way to safeguard digital learning environments, maximize instructional time, and minimize the load on IT teams so that education communities can focus on accelerating learning. 

A few of our new K-12 and higher education clients include Osceola School District, the Virginia Community College System, and the Nevada Department of Education. Identity Automation’s robust growth trajectory in the education space reflects a heightened need for IAM technology that keeps pace with the sector’s expanding needs in a transformed learning environment.

The company also strengthened partnerships, deploying a “better together” strategy through alliances with outstanding EdTech organizations like IMS Global, AWS and Clever. Identity Automation’s RapidIdentity platform will also work with nearly any SSO provider, though the platform has a unique integration with Clever that creates a seamless experience for Clever districts. Many of IA’s district clients are strengthening partnerships with other SSO providers, including ClassLink. Partnerships like these are made stronger by IA as districts are enabled by RapidIdentity to use digital identities to improve analytics, enhance the classroom experience, and improve cybersecurity.

Osceola School District, for example, is currently implementing RapidIdentity Cloud hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS) for managing digital identities while using ClassLink to enhance the classroom experience.  This strategy allows each district partner to focus on their core strengths to deliver for underserved students, while combining best-in-class EdTech and SSO resources with Identity Automation’s unique identity-first approach to cybersecurity.

Putting students at the center of technology, Identity Automation continues to innovate to address emerging needs, such as credential monitoring capabilities to counter growing ransomware threats. Identity Automation is developing new, innovative ways to help schools leverage digital identities to better understand student engagement and empower teachers to personalize instruction more efficiently while protecting privacy.

“IT professionals, leaders in C&I and administrators overcame unfathomable challenges amid the COVID-19 pandemic,” Harold said. “The solutions implemented quickly and by necessity in the initial phase of the pandemic no longer meet students’ needs and are oftentimes not secure. Over the past 12 months, we’ve worked with our partners to expand the range of digital identity and access management services available to students and educators alike. We’re focused on continuously keeping students at the center of our technological advances, and we’re just getting started.”

About Identity Automation
Identity Automation provides identity and access management (IAM) solutions for K-12 and higher education. Its flagship platform, RapidIdentity, safeguards learning environments, maximizes instructional time, and minimizes the load on Information & Educational Technology teams. Technology leaders turn to RapidIdentity for its best-in-class security capabilities, time-saving automations, and flexible approach to managing digital identities. Headquartered in Houston, Texas, Identity Automation is trusted by Chicago Public Schools, Public Schools of North Carolina, University of Rochester, Houston Community College, and hundreds of other institutions. To learn more about partnering with Identity Automation, visit www.identityautomation.com.   

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Kasey Thomas
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