This is big news. As far as I know, this is the first major hosting company to offer managed hosting for an Open Source LMS platform. (And Embanet is a fairly large firm, too.) I was just today talking with some folks at a small university who probably wouldn’t be able to consider using an open platform if it meant that they had to host it themselves. Kudos to the Sakai team for pulling this off.
Disclaimer
The views expressed here are solely my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.