e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Blackboard Ultra

  • Blackboard Ultra Update: Some Clarity

    Blackboard’s VP of Teaching and Learning, Valerie Schreiner, was kind enough to give Phil and me a fairly thorough update on the Ultra strategy on Wednesday. Their strategy is clearer to me now. That strategy, which I am about to share with you, is fairly coherent, reasonably interesting, and practically plausible in principle. There are still big execution questions that won’t be answered until we see what is released at BbWorld and talk to some customers. (More on this later.) But at least we have a better sense of what they are trying to do now.

    We don’t usually spend this much sustained time focusing on one company and product, but since we are getting a lot of feedback from readers that it is helpful and timely for them, and since Blackboard has been extremely responsive in providing us with clarifications, we’re going to stay on this one until we feel that it’s been adequately covered.

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  • Dear Blackboard, I am Confused

    The good news is that Blackboard, after going quiet for a while, is out giving updates again. The bad news is that the more they talk, the less I understand. A year and a half ago, I thought that I understood their Ultra strategy and had a pretty good guess about their odds of executing it. Last summer, I felt much less sure about the execution but still reasonably comfortable that I understood the basic strategy. Now, after Phil’s update on their strategy, I am forced to admit that I understand what is happening in Blackboard right now about as well as I understand what is happening in the Republican Presidential primary. I’m generally pretty good at following this stuff, and even I have lost the thread. The messaging has gotten so garbled that I have lost confidence in my understanding of the company’s product vision and strategy.

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  • What Blackboard’s New CEO Needs to Do Now (and how you can tell if he’s doing it)

    As Phil noted in his post, Blackboard has hired a new CEO, a guy by the name of Bill Ballhaus. We don’t know much about him yet, other than that he came from outside education. (That shouldn’t be considered a disqualifier, by the way. Instructure CEO Josh Coates also came from outside education, for example, and he has kept most of his customers very happy so far.) We’ll learn more about him over the next days, weeks, and months. In the meantime, it’s worth taking some time to consider the challenge he has in front of him.

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  • Blackboard: Ask and Ye Shall Receive (Better Answers)

    About a week ago, I complained about Blackboard’s lack of clarity in messaging about their platform in general and the implications for managed hosting customers in particular. I wrote, in part,

    What is “Premium SaaS”? Is it managed hosting? Is it private cloud? What does it mean for current managed hosting customers? What we have found is that there doesn’t seem to be complete shared understanding even among the Blackboard management team about what the answers to these questions are.

    The problem with this oversight is deeper than just leaving managed hosting customers in the dark. Blackboard is asking customers (and prospects) to have patience as the company performs a major retooling on their platforms. In order to get that patience, they need for customers to understand (and believe) that this really is a major retooling, what is being retooled (at a high level), and what they will get that’s different from other platforms at the end of the process. This is a hard communication challenge, but it is also Blackboard’s live-or-die challenge. They really need to convince customers and prospects that the platform has a bright future, and to do that, they have to communicate nuances and technical issues that are not easy to communicate to executives. This is not something that can be fixed with a couple of DevCon sessions.

    That’s why I was happy to see Blackboard respond this week with more clarity.

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