I shared the most recent graphic summarizing the LMS market in September 2012, and thanks to new data sources it’s time for an update. As with all previous versions, the 2005 – 2009 data points are based on the Campus Computing Project, and therefore is based on US adoption from non-profit institutions. This set of longitudinal data provides an anchor for the summary.
What I’ve been attempting to do lately is to expand the market definition beyond the US. Last year I used some heuristics:
Bill Flook, who covers the DC technology scene for Business Journals, just interviewed Blackboard CEO Jay Bhatt about last week’s layoff. The full article can be found here. From a quick read, it looks like Blackboard is executing on two key priorities:
From the article:
Blackboard Inc. carried out a round of layoffs last week as part of a broader reorganization by CEO Jay Bhatt, the latest in a string of actions aimed at revitalizing the 16-year-old ed-tech behemoth.
Bhatt, in an interview Tuesday evening, confirmed the job cuts, which he described as “a very small action we took to take some costs out of the business, primarily on things that don’t allow us to get where we need to go.” He declined to specify the number of layoffs.
As for the priority of trimming the fat, it is now fairly clear that Blackboard is not set to divest any major product lines, but rather will follow a path of centralization. The new management team is a key part of the reorganization plans.
In just the past week we have had three fairly significant people depart higher ed LMS companies. This really is turning out to be a bumpy ride as the market changes.
More to come.
In my last post, I promised that I would give an update specifically on the state of Blackboard’s learning analytics. Well, here you go. This is a summary of what I learned about their product from a chat with Mark Max, Blackboard’s VP of Learning Analytics and, to a lesser degree, with VP of User Experience Stephanie Weeks. I wrote about Blackboard’s Retention Center product some time ago. That product (or feature set, since it is free in Blackboard) directly competes with Desire2Learn’s Student Success System. This post is more broadly about their Analytics product suite, which is most directly analogous with Desire2Learn’s Insights product, although it is actually much, much broader in scope.
The short version is this: Blackboard has very solid and reliable technology base from which they are building their learning analytics. It is easily the most mature platform among the LMS providers from that perspective. What they are a little short on is vision. In other words, they are pretty much the mirror image of Desire2Learn.
Thanks for inviting me to this conference in Las Vegas, but I couldn’t help notice there is no After Party. Could you point me to the BbWorld conference instead? . . . What’s that? . . . Really?? Because I just came out of a product roadmap presentation where people were clapping, and not just for improved customer service but actual product usability and features that people want. . . . OK, OK, maybe you’re right . . . But the ex-WebCT folks were actually clapping the loudest. . . . WTH?
Blackboard’s user conference this year was unlike any previous BbWorld I’ve attended. After the WebCT acquisition in 2006, the user conferences tended to be love-hate events (love the show and good times, hate the acquisition of competitors and tin ear). After the 2009 acquisition of ANGEL and subsequent changes in the management team, the user conferences moderated to ambivalence. Many of the product announcements were exciting in the abstract, but it was not clear that product roadmaps and new features were directly addressing client concerns.
BbWorld 2013 was the first time that I’ve seen customers have such a positive response to Blackboard presentations. At least from a short-term roadmap perspective, the product changes presented this year seemed to hit the sweet spot of what current customers have been requesting. There was a sense of appreciation and relief from customers that Blackboard was listening and reacting to them. And that is no small feat.
A few weeks back, when blogging about Desire2Learn’s new Student Success System retention early warning analytics product, I wrote,
From what I can tell based on initial conversations with D2L about the product details, this now appears to be the system to beat. (I reserve the right to change my opinion based on implementation experiences from clients, which are particularly important for this product.)…
I’m going to try to talk to some D2L clients who are actually using this product next week when Phil and I are at D2L FUSION.
And then the other day, describing my overall impressions of the FUSION conference, I wrote,
Historically, my take on D2L has been as follows: On the good side, they have coherent product vision and their own take on the LMS space—I have a lot of respect for Ken Chapman as a product guy—and good relationships with their customers….On the bad side, D2L has not always been particularly good at executing technically difficult projects, and they have not always had a good sense of how well they are performing in that regard—what they have achieved, how long it will take them to deliver functionality, how serious the problems are, and so on….
[T]he point is that D2L seems to be making hires that have the potential to shore up their historic weaknesses. In the next 12-24 months, we will see whether these new hires are empowered to make a real difference in D2L’s performance.
It turns out that analytics is a perfect example the overall problems I described in the latter post: good product vision, serious technical implementation problems that have been understated and probably underestimated, and relatively new technical managers that seem to have some hope of getting the issues straightened out.
Phil and I spent some time at Desire2Learn’s FUSION conference the other week, and it was an interesting experience. D2L had a couple of first-ever “analyst days” in which we and a few others got some intensive briefings on their products and strategies. (D2L isn’t the only company that is doing this sort of thing, but they’ve gone significantly further with it than the other LMS companies have so far.) It was a useful complement to the information that we get from walking the floor and talking to customers. And, as I’m sure they intended, we walked away from the experience feeling somewhat more positive about the company than we did going in—not so much because of the dog-and-pony show but because we were able to ask some hard questions to senior managers and, more often than not, get reasonable answers.
Historically, my take on D2L has been as follows: On the good side, they have coherent product vision and their own take on the LMS space—I have a lot of respect for Ken Chapman as a product guy—and good relationships with their customers. These factors contribute significantly to their very high customer retention rate, even relative to the other LMS providers which, as a group, generally have fairly high retention rates. On the bad side, D2L has not always been particularly good at executing technically difficult projects, and they have not always had a good sense of how well they are performing in that regard—what they have achieved, how long it will take them to deliver functionality, how serious the problems are, and so on. CEO John Baker, whose deeply ingrained sense of optimism enabled him to face down a patent lawsuit against serious odds, can be the worst offender in this regard. He is chronically overly optimistic about the state of the company’s products and the seriousness of any bumps in the road.
In the last year or two, D2L has begun hiring some outsiders to bolster their technical team. They have benefitted from the hot tech market in Kitchener in general and to the collapse of RIM in particular, snapping up relatively senior Blackberry technical people. But it’s fair to say that they have been actively recruiting tech talent, both inside and outside of Kitchener, for a while now. For example, they hired Al Essa, whom I have known for over a decade since his time as CEO of MIT’s Sloan School of Business and his leadership in the dotLRN open source LMS community, to head up their analytics product line.
It’s hard to tell for certain whether this hiring trend has accelerated since D2L received their investment, but it certainly appears like that might be the case. I’ll call out the example of Nick Oddson, the new VP of Enterprise Product Engineering, who came from OpenText (a serious enterprise content management company that you probably have never heard of). Nick impressed both Phil and me as a guy who knows his stuff and is a straight shooter about what the company is doing well and what it is not doing well yet. At some point we expect to write more about what Nick in particular is up to, because we think it’s pretty pivotal for the future of the company. For now, the point is that D2L seems to be making hires that have the potential to shore up their historic weaknesses. In the next 12-24 months, we will see whether these new hires are empowered to make a real difference in D2L’s performance.
I’ll have a follow-up post specifically on their analytics products fairly soon.
