Case Study: Teach For America cuts IT costs by US$600,000 and ensures high-availability teacher application portal with Oracle Exadata

Teach For America Cuts IT Costs by US$600,000 in Three Years, Ensures Highly Available Teacher Application Portal During Admission Season

Teach For America, a nonprofit that recruits and trains teachers to address educational inequity, needed a more reliable, cost-effective data infrastructure to handle seasonal spikes — particularly five high‑volume application deadlines — and to support rapid organizational growth that doubled teacher numbers. The organization also sought to reduce complexity from five different database platforms so IT could focus resources on its core mission.

Teach For America consolidated its database estate onto Oracle Exadata, deploying two Exadata machines (one for production and one for development) and planning a third for disaster recovery. The move simplified management, sped provisioning from weeks to hours, ensured consistent high performance for the teacher application (about 50,000 applications annually), reduced required in‑house skill sets, and is estimated to save roughly US$600,000 over three years.

Teach For America

Thomas Licciardello

Vice President, Technology Operations