e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: corporate LMS

  • MarketsandMarkets: Getting the LMS market wrong

    New LMS market analysis with a leader list that includes a company that is retiring its LMS and ignores the company who has a 5x lead in new implementations for its core market? Sign me up.

    Over the next week or two, we plan several posts at e-Literate based on the various LMS users conferences we recently attended. We already covered Sakai and Blackboard, and we will have commentary on Moodle, Schoology, D2L, and Canvas soon. But before we do so, I wanted to call out the recent analysis by MarketsandMarkets, which requires some commentary as it is leading to some media coverage that could misinform those trying to understand the LMS market. The headline of their recent market report:

    Learning Management System (LMS) Market Worth 15.72 Billion USD by 2021

    According to a new market research report, “Learning Management System Market by Application, Delivery Mode (Distance Learning and Instructor-Led Training), Deployment (On-Premises and Cloud), User Type (Academic and Corporate), Vertical, and Region – Global Forecast to 2021”, published by MarketsandMarkets, the LMS market size is expected to grow from USD 5.22 Billion in 2016 to USD 15.72 Billion by 2021, at a CAGR of 24.7%.

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  • Instructure: Accelerating growth in 3 parallel markets

    I’m not sure which is more surprising – Instructure’s continued growth with no major hiccups or their competitors’ inability after a half-decade to understand and accept what is at its core a very simple strategy. Despite Canvas LMS winning far more new higher ed and K-12 customers than any other vendor, I still hear competitors claim that schools select Canvas due to rigged RFPs or being the shiny new tool despite having no depth or substance. When listening to the market, however, (institutions – including faculty, students, IT staff, academic technology staff, and admin), I hear the opposite. Canvas is winning LMS selections despite, not because of, RFP processes, and there are material and substantive reasons for this success.

    The only competitor I see that seems to understand the depth of the challenge they face is Blackboard. Other LMS solutions are adding “cloud” options or making incremental improvements to usability, but only Blackboard is going for wholesale changes to both its User Experience (UX) and cloud hosting architecture. Unfortunately, I question whether Blackboard will be able to execute this strategy, but that is a story for another post.

    Like last year’s post about InstructureCon, I believe that the company growth chart ((The chart shows the number of clients, which is essentially the number of contracts signed with institutions, school districts, or statewide systems adopting either Canvas or Bridge LMS products.)) gives a lot more information than just “gosh, we’re doing well”. (more…)

  • First View of Bridge: The new corporate LMS from Instructure

    Last week I covered the announcement from Instructure that they had raised another $40 million in venture funding and were expanding into the corporate learning market. Today I was able to see a demo of their new corporate LMS, Bridge. While Instructure has very deliberately designed a separate product from Canvas, their education-focused LMS, you can see the same philosophy of market strategy and product design embedded in the new system. In a nutshell, Bridge is designed to a simple, intuitive platform that moves control of the learning design away from central HR or IT control and closer to the end user.

    While our primary focus at e-Literate is on higher ed and even some K-12 learning, the development of professional development and corporate training markets are becoming more important even in the higher ed context. At the least, this is important for those who are tracking Instructure and how their company plans might affect the future of education platforms.

    The core message of Instructure regarding Bridge – just as with Canvas – is that it is focused on ease-of-use whereas the entrenched competition has fallen prey to feature bloat based on the edge cases. Despite this claim and despite Instructure’s track record with Canvas, what does this mean? I’m pretty sure every vendor out there claims ease-of-use whether or not there are elegant or terrible designs ((Although I would love to see the honest ad: “With a horrible, bloated user interface based on your 300-item RFP checklist!”)).

    Based on the demo, Bridge appears to define ease-of-use in three distinct areas – streamlined, clutter-free interface for learners, simple tools for content creation by business units, and simple tools for managing learners and content. (more…)

  • What TechCrunch Got Wrong (and Right) About Instructure Entering Corporate Learning Market

    After yesterday’s “sources say” report from TechCrunch about Instructure – maker of the Canvas LMS – raising a new round of financing and entering the corporate LMS space, Instructure changed plans and made their official announcement to today. The funding is to both expand the Canvas team and to establish the new corporate LMS team. I’m not a fan of media attempts to get a scoop based purely on rumors, and in this case TechCrunch got a few items wrong that are worth correcting.

    • Instructure raised $40 million in new financing (series E), not “between $50 to $70 million”. TechCrunch did hedge their bets with “low end of the range at over $40 million”.
    • The primary competition in the corporate LMS space is Saba, SumTotal, Skillsoft, Cornerstone – and not Blackboard.
    • The Canvas LMS was launched in 2010, not 2011. (OK, I’ll give them this one, as even Instructure seems to use the 2011 date).

    TechCrunch did get the overall story of fund-raising and new corporate product right, but these details matter.

    Instructure’s new product for the corporate learning market is called Bridge, with its web site here. This is an entirely new product, although it does share a similar product architecture as Canvas, the LMS designed for the education market (including being based on Ruby on Rails). Unlike Canvas, Bridge was designed mobile-first, with all mobile capabilities embedded in the product and not as separate applications. In an interview with Josh Coates, CEO of Instructure, he described their motivation for this new product.

    We like the idea of building software that helps people get smarter. Post education there is a void, with bad corporate software.

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