PRESS RELEASE

The Antitrust accepts the commitments submitted in order to remove constraints in the choice of management and application software for keeping an electronic register at school and for correspondence with families

The Competition and Market Guarantor Authority has finalized an investigation on the companies Argo Software S.r.l. and Axios Italia Service S.r.l., by accepting their commitments and thereby closing the proceedings without recording any infraction. By virtue of such obligations, schools will now have greater freedom of choice among rival management systems and among applications for the electronic register and correspondence with families. The intervention by the Antitrust marks a step forward towards the interoperability among different platforms which promotes, among citizens and public administrations, a static and dynamic competition in the markets affected by digitization, thereby incentivizing the diffusion of Internet access on the part of families.

In particular, as regards exporting the data included in the database of their management software, the two companies bound themselves to adopt procedures rendering the data themselves capable of effective utilization on the part of other operators. Axios Italia Service has further bound itself to allow the data included in the databases to be read by rival suppliers (authorized by the schools to use the data), which will in turn acknowledge the same opportunity in its favour.

The Antitrust has taken the view that the commitments submitted by Argo Software and Axios Italia Service, as they appear after the clarifications and modifications which followed the market test, were capable of removing the anti-competition aspects, inasmuch as they occasion a marked improvement in terms of data availability and accessibility for the schools. In that sense, they also significantly impact on the capacity of the management and application software which regulate the electronic register and the correspondence between school and families to share the same databases, thereby expanding the opportunity for choices on the part of the schools.

Rome, 23 December 2014