Xamarin is at the top of the class with Pearson

CASE STUDY

About Pearson

Pearson is the world's leading learning company, with 40,000 employees in over 80 countries helping people of all ages make measurable educational progress.

The recently introduced Pearson System of Courses (PSOC) is a vertically and horizontally aligned system that supports learning, motivation, and engagement through a coherent curriculum covering mathematics from Kindergarten through 11th Grade and English Language Arts from Kindergarten through 12th Grade. The innovative solution includes a unique digital design created to make use of digital tablets and the latest mobile and digital technologies that students already use every day. Pearson recognized the need to support multiple devices and operating systems early on, but the initial search for

the right development platform proved frustrating. While the importance of a cross-platform approach was obvious, the company was disappointed in the quality and fidelity of the options it tested.

Pearson found the expertise it sought in Xamarin Partner Fino Consulting, an IT consulting firm based in New York City. Fino, which focuses on solving complex business problems for medium and large enterprises, created the seamless cross-platform efficiency, quality, and fidelity that Pearson required using Microsoft Visual Studio and the Xamarin Platform.

HIGHLIGHTS Xamarin Insights helped spot potential problems early in the app development lifecycle.

65% shared code helped to increae stability and performance.

Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure supports anticipated loads of 40 terabytes in the first year.

An agile solutionWhen it came time to move Pearson's tablet-based education platform beyond the iPad, it was a no-brainer to couple Fino Consulting’s expertise with Xamarin’s cross-platform capabilities. With their help, we were able to leverage key components of our iOS codebase to create a solution that supported students using our innovative software on a wide variety of devices,” says Matt Webster, Vice President of System Architecture at Pearson.

Fino had special appreciation for Xamarin because of its own work with other solutions. “We have experience with many different mobile development platforms and tools. The others all suffer from a range of standard, critical flaws that make them fall short of anything but the simplest type of mobile app.” Christian Jungers, CTO

at Fino Consulting reports. PSOC required an agile software development process that would enable the large and complex project to move forward quickly and flexibly, while maintaining a high level of quality. Jungers notes, “Fino led a team of more than 50 developers, 50 project managers, UI designers, and QA professionals.”

Reducing development time through maximal code sharing across platforms also helped cut development time.

Xamarin enables our developers to use 65% common code across the platforms Pearson supports,” Jungers says. “This translates into a dramatic reduction in total development time required across all platforms. The shared code also increases stability and performance.”

Better education through technologyIntroduced in 2014, PSOC was immediately adopted by eight school districts serving 85,000 students around the U.S., and Pearson expects that number to increase by about 50% by the end of 2015.

Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure is used to support anticipated loads of some 40 terabytes within the first year of operation. The Azure portion of the solution feeds cross-platform tablet interfaces on iOS, Windows 8.1, and soon, Android.

PSOC moves a terrific amount of data around,” O’Connor says. “The digital curriculum can be media rich. It’s one thing to have someone at home downloading a movie

that’s 1 GB, but it’s a different situation when you have 1,000 students in a single school who need to download 5 or 10 GB each. There can be huge challenges around managing that content flow and facilitating the data transfer. No one is close to PSOC in producing anything like this at such a large scale.”

The robustness of the Xamarin Platform and its alignment with .NET make it a powerful tool to take advantage of, ” says Jungers. “In addition, few companies in technology are so active with respect to introducing solid new features every year that directly address the needs of their customers.”

Sam Edwards via Getty Images

When I go out to organizations and talk cross-platform, I tell them we’re all-in on Xamarin technology.”

”

Keith O’Connor, Director at Fino Consulting

“

“

“

“

Cleaner code with Xamarin InsightsFino also values the power of Xamarin Insights, an intelligent analytics and crash reporting system, to help them spot potential problems early within the development cycle before they create problems for PSOC users.

The ease of use of Xamarin Insights has allowed our team to catch many more defects, far earlier in the cycle than would otherwise have been the case,” says Jungers. Xamarin Insights provides fantastic value.”

“

“

hello@xamarin.com +1 (855) 926-2746 xamarin.com