As busy as I have been lately, I have tried to keep up on the various analyses of Blackboard’s acquisition by Providence Equity Partners, Inc. There seem to be two schools of thought. The first school, which seems to be getting the most play, is moderately negative for higher education. The second school, which I’ve […]
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More Blackboard Acquisition Coverage Coming
Jim Farmer tells me that I really should write at least one analysis post on the Blackboard acquisition myself. Since it’s Jim doing the asking, I’m going to do that. But I still don’t feel like I’m going to be able to do justice to an event of this magnitude. As a result, I will […]
Investment Bankers and Blackboard’s Future, Part One: If …
This is a guest post by Jim Farmer, Chairman of Sigma Group Inc. On Friday July 1,st after this was written, Blackboard Inc. was acquired by “affiliates of Providence Equity Partners” for $1.64 billion. They will also assume approximately $130 million in net debt. Providence will pay $45 per share; it closed Thursday at […]
Blackboard Has Been Acquired
You may or may not have heard the news that Blackboard has agreed to be acquired by a private equity firm called Providence Equity for a total of $1.64 billion. Ray Henderson has a blog post about the acquisition here. I’m still completely overwhelmed trying to get up to speed on my new job, so […]
The Blackboard/Moodle FOIA Requests
Vicki Tambellini is reporting that a number of colleges who moved from Blackboard to Moodle are getting hit with Freedom of Information Act requests: Last week a number of institutions received FOIA requests from a law firm in Columbia, South Carolina. The firm requests everything related to individual LMS procurements from the RFP process through […]
The Changing Dynamics of the Educational Technology Markets
Phil Hill has two good blog posts up in response to Blackboard’s announcement that it has received at least two “unsolicited non-binding proposals” for the company to be acquired. In his first post, Phil argues that, whatever the outcome of the bidding, Blackboard’s brand value will be hurt: In one dramatic shift, Blackboard has gone […]
Desire2Learn Enters the Mobile Portal Business
This is interesting. I have previously argued that, of Blackboard’s two mobile businesses, their LMS mobile business (a.k.a. Mobile Learn) is going to come under lots of pressure to get bundled with the platform as the competition does just that, while their mobile portal business (a.k.a. Mobile Central) is likely to be a viable business […]