Providing for the technology requirements of 30 far-flung schools with intense computing requirements falls to Josh Blazer, the regional director of technology, at The Art Institutes. He has to purchase workstations for the different schools according to their student population.

At The Art Institutes, workstations occupy classrooms and fill dedicated computer labs. The workstations are a mix of HPs and Macs. A small school might have 50 workstations. A large school could have twenty labs each with twenty workstations. All told, a single school could have more than 500 machines to manage.

A central group makes sets the purchasing standards for all 30 schools. Blazer says that about eight people form the hardware committee, including directors of technology at the schools. "We create the standards by which all the schools make their purchases, including vendor selection." Blazer says, "We've chosen to remain with HP as the primary vendor for workstations."

Blazer notes that The Art Institutes have had a long history with HP, using their products for the last ten years. Among the main reason for using HP as an exclusive provider of workstations is the manner in which they've responded to comments from the The Art Institutes. "HP has consistently listened to us. They've been willing to incorporate changes into their workstation design based on our needs and input."

Such receptivity is a sign of The Art Institutes' purchasing power. It makes new workstation purchases every six months, and keeps the workstations it buys in circulation for three years. Workstations taken out of the computer labs after three years are sometimes put to other uses around the schools.

During the last two purchasing rounds, The Art Institutes bought the HP xw4100 and, previously, the xw5000. Each was set at a gigabyte of RAM and came with high-end video cards, the NVIDIA Quadro4 980 XGL, and before that the 900 XGL.

"We tend to purchase at the midlevel of the model range," says Blazer, "and then bump up the memory and graphics since we have high requirements in those areas."

The machines are generally installed with software from either Apple or Microsoft, the Macromedia suite, a collection of Adobe programs, and tools from Discreet. Specialized labs, such as those for audio/visual work, get Final Cut Pro and After Effects.

Blazer says that the software put into the workstations run the gamut of available productivity titles. "The primary users of our computer labs are using tools for multimedia, Web, animation, graphic design, and illustration coursework." Blazer says, "There are twenty to thirty programs of study, and we install the software they're at all likely to need."