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Tag: Bloomberg

  • Blackboard Updates: Learn SaaS progress and LMS market news

    Blackboard Updates: Learn SaaS progress and LMS market news

    Blackboard had a lot of news to share two weeks ago when we spoke with CEO Bill Ballhaus and senior teaching and learning executives. The updates addressed efforts to streamline the business, customer retention, and customer acquisition. Blackboard ((Disclosure: Blackboard is a subscriber to our LMS Market Analysis service.)) was upbeat about their current position and prospects going forward, but we see a mixed picture.

    Ballhaus said that Blackboard’s efforts to simplify the business were paying off and leading to greater focus on their core teaching and learning businesses. While the company was built as an enterprise software amalgamation based on 20+ corporate acquisitions, Ballhaus described how management is looking forward to becoming a Software as a Service (SaaS) business with a simpler focus. While the executives declined to comment on current M&A activity, Blackboard appears to be trying to sell its CashNet and Transact products that are part of the same business line focused on campus ID and payment processing, for up to $800 million and $720 million respectively ((Although it is possible that both of these reports are referring to the same combined transaction – CashNet and Transact together. This explanation makes more sense to me.)). Remembering that Blackboard reportedly tried but failed to sell the entire company for ~$3 billion in 2015, there is no guarantee that they will actually sell either unit or get the desired prices. [Update 3/7: Blackboard did end up selling entire Transact business unit , including CashNet, to PE firm Reverence Capital for a reported $720m.] But if they do succeed, the profits from either sale will help the company pay down and manage its debt. And it will back up the claims of focusing the company on core teaching and learning business.

    The claim of the company looking forward to being a pure-SaaS business is largely based on their ability to migrate the flagship Learn LMS client base over to the AWS-enabled Learn SaaS offering. Blackboard leadership believes that the ongoing migrating effort has been a critical factor in improving their customer retention numbers, an argument that we made last summer.

    The third issue, which is related to the first two, is that we believe that the migration to Learn SaaS might be a better indicator – at least in the short run – than Ultra adoption of whether a school plans to stick with Blackboard. Whether or not the school enables Ultra base navigation or any courses in the Ultra Experience.

    When a school moves to Learn SaaS, they tend to sign contract extensions for 1 – 3 years to cover the new services. And the migration to Learn SaaS does not suffer from the vague terminology issues – a school either uses Learn deployed on SaaS (through AWS) or they don’t.

    Ballhaus went so far as to say that Blackboard’s improvements in client retention was the primary factor in the overall market slowdown last year. While we certainly feel that Blackboard has benefited from the slowdown and has improved client retention lately, we are not convinced on the cause and effect dynamics. By tracking the public proclamations of Learn SaaS adoptions, we see an interesting linear trend leading to the current ~25% of Learn clients being on SaaS.

    Learn SaaS Adoptions Over Time

    Blackboard continued to present the importance of their broad product portfolio combined with their experience. Ballhaus stressed that the LMS is necessary but not sufficient as a strategy for the company. Blackboard management sees Blackboard at an inflection point in 2019 in a good way, and they stressed that their big focus will now be on data and analytics offerings. Remember this paragraph when we get to the Instructure update post.

    Early in February Blackboard announced what could be their biggest LMS win since we broke the news of University of Phoenix selecting Blackboard Learn Ultra in late 2015 (a migration that is scheduled to be complete by this summer). From the press release about Galileo Global and their 100,000+ student system:

    Blackboard today announced that Galileo Global Education, a leading international provider of higher education and Europe’s largest higher education group, will roll out Blackboard Learn with the Ultra experience as the common Learning Management System (LMS) for its network of 37 schools with 80 campuses across 10 countries. Blackboard Learn Ultra was selected over other cloud-based solutions for the ease of use, the powerful features, and the unparalleled level of support provided by Blackboard.

    On the surface, this is a big win for Blackboard, but the story comes with a caveat regarding its relevance to the LMS market. What was not shared during our call with Blackboard executives is that they share their private equity owner (Providence) with Galileo as described in late 2017.

    Laureate Education, Inc. (NASDAQ:LAUR), the world’s largest global network of higher education institutions, and Galileo Global Education, a company under the umbrella of Providence Equity, a leading global asset management firm, have signed an agreement for the sale of Laureate’s institutions in Italy and Cyprus for a total transaction value of Euro 225 million (USD 263 million at the current exchange rate).

    Two or three schools within Galileo were already on Blackboard Learn, a few on Moodle, and the majority on Homegrown or not really using an LMS previously. Unless we can get independent confirmation about the nature of the selection (was it truly competitive or was it earmarked for Blackboard as long as they met minimum requirements), I would not extrapolate this news to show broader movements in the market.

    Blackboard also presented some data around roughly 200 new LMS customer acquisitions in 2018 (“new logos”) for both Open LMS (the rebranded Moodlerooms) and Learn.

    • The majority of the reported wins, roughly 120 based on interview, are for Open LMS, showing continued growth for this under-the-radar Blackboard product. These numbers are impressive, but we note that last year the company reported 223 Moodlerooms “new logos” in 2017. It will be interesting to track over time if this deceleration is primarily driven by the general market slowdown vs. fallout from the cancelled Moodle Partner agreement.
    • For the Learn LMS, Blackboard is reporting ~80 new logos in 2018, of which 52% are in higher education. If accurate, this would be a significant turnaround for the company; however, our data do not show this level of new wins for Blackboard unless you include Galileo as roughly 30 “new logos”. We asked Blackboard to back up that number with specifics such as sample listings to see if we have holes in our data, but Blackboard declined to provide further information due to “privacy reasons”. During the same time period, according to our data, Blackboard has lost more than 100 institutions, more than three fourths moving to Canvas and the remainder moving to D2L Brightspace.

    In the end, Blackboard is making steady progress with Learn SaaS deployments and contract extensions, benefiting from the LMS market slowdown, and winning their biggest new LMS account since 2015. We are not convinced that Blackboard is causing the slowdown or that their new Learn momentum goes beyond Galileo Global, but there are signs of progress worth sharing.

    Update 2/27: Fixed description of CashNet and Transact, which are part of the same business line, and added footnote.

  • A response to Bloomberg article on UCLA student fees

    Megan McArdle has an article that was published in Bloomberg this week about the growth of student fees. The setup of the article was based on a new “$4 student fee to pay for better concerts”.

    To solve this problem, UCLA is introducing a $4 student fee to pay for better concerts. That illuminates a budgeting issue in higher education — and indeed among human beings more generally.

    That $4 is not a large fee. Even the poorest student can probably afford it. On the other hand, collectively, UCLA’s student fees are significant: more than $3,500, or about a quarter of the mandatory cost of attending UCLA for a year.

    Those fees are made up of many items, each trivial individually. Only collectively do they become a major source of costs for students and their families and potentially a barrier to college access for students who don’t have an extra $3,500 lying around.

    I’m sympathetic to the argument that college often costs too much and that institutions can play revenue games to avoid the appearance of raising tuition. I also think that Megan is one of the better national journalists on the topic of the higher education finances.

    UCLA Fees

    However, this article is somewhat sloppy in a way that harms the overall message. I would like to clarify the student fees data to help show the broader point.

    Let’s look at the actual data from UCLA’s web site. I assume that Megan is basing this analysis on in-state undergraduate full-time students. The data is listed per quarter, and UCLA has three quarters for a full academic year. I have summarized below summing three quarters into yearly data, and you can:

    • Hover over each measure to see the fee description from UCLA’s fee description page;
    • Click on each category that I added to see the component fees;
    • Sort either column; and
    • Choose which rows to keep or exclude.
    • NOTE: Static image above if you cannot see interactive graphics

    Some Clarifications Needed

    • The total of non-tuition fees is $3,750 per year, not $3,500; however, Megan is right that this represents “about a quarter of the mandatory cost of attending UCLA for a year” ($3,750 out of $14,970).
    • The largest single fee is the UC health insurance fee (UC-SHIP), which is more than half of the total non-tuition fees. This fact (noted by Michael Berman on Twitter) should have been pointed out, given the significant percentage of the total.
    • With the UC-SHIP at $1,938 and the student services fee at $972, I hardly consider these as “trivial individually”.

    Broader Point on Budgeting

    The article’s broader point is that using extraneous fees to create additional revenue leads to a flawed budgeting process.

    As I’ve written before, this is a common phenomenon that you see among people who have gotten themselves into financial trouble — or, for that matter, people who are doing OK but complain that they don’t know where the money goes and can’t save for the big-ticket items they want. They consider each purchase individually, rather than in the context of a global budget, which means that they don’t make trade-offs. Instead of asking themselves “Is this what I want to spend my limited funds on, or would I rather have something else?” they ask “Can I afford this purchase on my income?” And the answer is often “Yes, I can.” The problem is that you can’t afford that purchase and the other 15 things that you can also, one by one, afford to buy on your income. This is how individual financial disasters occur, and it is also one way that college tuition is becoming a financial disaster for many families.

    This point is very important. Look at the Wooden Center fee, described here (or by hovering over chart):

    Covers repayment of the construction bond plus the ongoing maintenance and utilities costs for the John Wooden Recreation Center. It was approved by student referendum. The fee is increased periodically based on the Consumer Price Index.

    To take Megan’s point, this fee “was approved by student referendum”, which means that UCLA has moved budgeting responsibility away from a holistic approach to saying “the students voted on it”. This makes no financial sense, nor does it make sense to shift bond repayment and maintenance and utilities cost onto student fees.

    While this article had some sloppy reporting in terms of accurately describing the student fees, it does highlight an important aspect of the budget problems in higher education and how the default method is to shift the costs to students.