Polar Design and Expedient Partner to help STEM Center USA with the Shark Tank Effect

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Mar 09, 2016, 08:00 ET

BOSTON, March 9, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- STEM Center USA, a leading K-12 education company, earned a spot on ABC's Shark Tank. Working together and with only two weeks notice, Polar Design and Expedient prepared their website to withstand the traffic influx of the "Shark Tank Effect" and impress new visitors with a comprehensive design and technology solution.

When your business involves child STEM education and robots, you can't afford slowing down even for a moment. STEM Center USA has engaged students and parents with compelling robotics-based STEM education for nearly four years. In early October of 2015, with just a few weeks to prepare, they learned of their scheduled October 30^th appearance on ABC's Shark Tank. The widely known "Shark Tank Effect" brings tens of thousands of visitors to featured companies' websites per hour and in some cases lasts weeks. Past businesses appearing on the show that did not prepare saw their web sites slow down, crash, or simply fail to impress Shark Tank's vast audience.

STEM Center USA's website, developed at its inception, featured an outdated look and messaging, and utilized a shared hosting service. When STEM Center USA notified Polar Design of this exciting and challenging event, they sprang into action immediately and crafted a plan to modernize the site's look. "We added compelling video, and restructured the web site technology to operate across multiple servers. In partnership with Expedient, a leader in cloud hosting services, we deployed a revamped, refactored web site across three virtualized and load balanced web servers with a separate database server all in just over two weeks," stated Mark J. Jaklovsky, Managing Director of Polar Design

The web site's performance skipped along without missing a beat, even during moments of the heaviest load exceeding 10,000 simultaneous visitors.

According to Melissa Jawaharlal, the CEO and co-founder of STEM Center USA, "when [STEM Center USA] learned that we'd be on Shark Tank, one thing we knew we could relax about was our web site. Polar Design and Expedient had plans in place to transition our site to the cloud. We were able to rapidly, and beautifully, upgrade our site with ease. Once we pulled the trigger, we had full confidence we could enjoy reliving the moment when Sharks Lori Greiner and Chris Sacca made their offers rather than worrying about how our site would perform under the 'Shark Tank Effect'"

About Polar Design:

Polar Design (www.polardesign.com) is a full-service Boston digital marketing agency founded in 1999 to crystallize communications. Headquartered in the Boston metro area, Polar Design's team of local, national and international collaborators deliver best of breed software development, award winning graphic design, insightful digital marketing strategy and execution. Current and past clients include mid-sized and Fortune 500 companies, web and mobile startups, Taft-Hartley funds and government agencies. Polar Design prides itself in delivering tangible success for its clients by aligning agency recommendations with client vision and objectives with solutions designed to meet key performance objectives.

About Expedient:

In addition to traditional data center colocation services (11 data centers in 7 cities), Expedient offers a wide range of managed services such as virtualization, cloud computing, remote backups, management of equipment, storage area networks and more. The company was built through a series of acquisitions in the early to mid-2000s timeframe, with all of its markets offering experienced data center colocation services for 10 years or more. Expedient's legal name is Continental Broadband LLC, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of Landmark Media Enterprises LLC, a private firm whose predecessor companies bring more than 100 years of experience operating media and technology interests. Learn more at www.expedient.com.

SOURCE Expedient