How Educate 360 modernized the integration backbone behind a house of specialist training brands

Educate 360 is a Boston-headquartered, private-equity-backed house of specialist training brands — New Horizons, TRACOM, Project Management Academy, Velopi, Six Sigma Online, Watermark Learning, and TCM Security — that helps organizations and professionals build career-critical skills across IT, project management, leadership, cybersecurity, business analysis, data, and process improvement. It is the kind of company that brings established specialists under one roof without flattening what made each of them trusted: certification authorities, published authors, hands-on practitioners, and instructors with decades of experience.

Growth like that comes with a systems bill. Bringing respected brands together meant connecting the platforms behind them — learning systems, Salesforce, NetSuite, and customer-facing websites — across acquisitions, modalities, and a fast-moving technology catalog. A capable team can rebuild a stack on a tight timeline. Doing it across that many moving parts, with a small group and a mandate to run lean, is the moment when the right partner changes the outcome.

To modernize its integration layer and protect the time of the people running it, Educate 360 partnered with Altura Innovation.

Coming out of an acquisition, Educate 360's systems team inherited a platform that worked — but the middleware holding it together had been built for a smaller, simpler business. It was hand-coded to move data between systems, and it did, as long as someone stayed close to it. As the brands, the catalog, and the daily order flow grew, staying close to it became a standing job.

That cost showed up in the most human way possible. As Educate 360's Systems Architect described it:

“We had a guy on the team that [had] been with the company for years who couldn't go on PTO without checking out his phone to make sure that the sales orders and all of the other things that needed to run day-to-day were running. So my promise to the CIO was that if we could get to a Celigo type integration that we could give him this PTO back.”

This wasn't a technology failure; it was the growing pains of a capable team running lean and being asked to pick up the pace. The systems had reached the natural edge of the tooling holding them together, and the team saw it early. They knew where they wanted to go — an enterprise-grade integration platform in Celigo — and they knew something just as important about how they wanted to get there: they didn't want to become full-time integration-tool experts themselves.

“We don't really want to become experts in the integration tool but we do want to have somebody that we can reach out to that feels like an extended part of the team.”

Educate 360 interviewed several firms and narrowed the field before deciding who to work with. What tipped the decision wasn't a pitch — it was a philosophy of delivery that matched how the team wanted to operate.

“We chose Dave as the guy we wanted to work with, and it proved out everything that we hoped that the partnership would, which is please come in and not just do, but teach us how to do ourselves.”

That "teach us how to do ourselves" principle shaped the entire engagement. Altura took on the longer-term and more challenging integration work while pairing with Educate 360's team on the day-to-day, so the internal team could own routine changes instead of waiting in a queue. The value of that arrangement was something the Systems Architect put plainly:

“It's like having access to the expert in the back room without paying the fully burdened compensation.”

The relationship worked because the Altura team didn't advise from a distance. Beyond guiding the internal team on how to approach the work, senior Altura people took on some of the work directly — which moved the whole conversion along faster.

With Altura on the longer-horizon integration work and the internal team owning the operational changes, Educate 360 rewrote its learning management system (Saba), Salesforce, the connections between them, and the website — and stood the whole thing up with a small team. The integrations held.

“The integrations just worked incredibly well. And so, eight months to be able to rewrite those systems with the few amount of people that we had.”

The move to Celigo took Educate 360 from hand-coded, point-to-point middleware to an enterprise-grade integration platform — one that surfaces errors clearly and shows the team exactly where to look. In practice, that meant the person who once checked nightly runs from his phone could trust the system to tell him when something needed attention.

Just as important, the working relationship became genuinely collaborative. Because it was built on trust and knowledge transfer rather than ticket ping-pong, the conversations stopped feeling like vendor escalations.

“In this kind of partnership, it is so trusted that it feels like you're just explaining things to a coworker.”

For a house of specialist brands that needs to keep growing without growing its headcount in lockstep, the engagement pointed at a broader operating principle. The Systems Architect framed the tradeoff directly:

“I believe trying to build all the in-house expertise for every single application and stay current on it has become prohibitive.”

Choosing the right partner smartly, he said, is "the future of IT development." With a stable integration backbone and a partner available to step in on the hard parts, Educate 360 freed its lean team to focus on advancing the business — and on giving its people their time back.

Altura Innovation is a strategic partner specializing in optimizing and scaling NetSuite and Celigo ecosystems for growing organizations. By embedding senior technical expertise and transferring knowledge to the in-house team — not creating dependency — Altura helps companies turn complex, multi-system operations into reliable, growth-ready infrastructure.

Educate 360 is a house of specialist professional-training brands — including New Horizons, TRACOM, Project Management Academy, Velopi, Six Sigma Online, Watermark Learning, and TCM Security — helping individuals, enterprises, and government agencies build career-critical skills across IT, project management, leadership, cybersecurity, business analysis, data, and process improvement. Built on a mission to propel growth, Educate 360 brings established specialists together under one platform while preserving the expertise and credibility that made each brand trusted.