Vegas might want to start taking bets on “What will Blackboard buy next?” Today, the Washington DC-based company announced an agreement to acquire Schoolwires, which provides web hosting and content management tools to more than 11 million users across over 1,700 districts and school organizations in US and China.
According to the release, this deal “will further establish [Blackboard’s] position as a leading provider of school websites and parent notification solutions.” The company has previously gobbled up developers of such tools via a merger with EdLine in 2011 and purchase of ParentLink in 2014.
Blackboard CEO Jay Bhatt is following through on his words to re-tool the company’s learning management system, which is widely used but not always widely loved. He promised an “avalanche of acquisitions in the pipeline” last year, and so far he’s delivered: Once this deal is approved, the company will have acquired six eight companies since January 2014.
