e-Literate

Present is Prologue

Tag: Jay Bhatt

  • Blackboard Replaces CEO Jay Bhatt: What happened

    Just over four years since Providence Equity Partners acquired Blackboard and three years after they brought in Jay Bhatt to replace co-founder Michael Chasen, the company announced another change in CEO. Blackboard has removed Jay Bhatt and replaced him with Bill Ballhaus. The official reason from the announcement:

    Today, we are fortunate to be joined by a great leader – our new CEO Bill Ballhaus. Bill’s philosophy is directly in line with ours and his skill set is going to help us reach new heights. While this is certainly a change for Blackboard, rest assured that the heart of our mission and strategy will remain the same. [snip]

    So we have defined our strategy and now, with Bill joining the company, we’ll continue to execute against it. Bill has accomplished much over his career and his operational expertise has led various businesses to great success. He and I share a fundamental belief that if you make your first priority taking care of your customers, the business results will follow. So, under his leadership Blackboard will continue our focus on doing just that. We will deliver next generation teaching and learning capabilities to the market, continue our international growth, and improve even further the way we serve our customers and strive to exceed their expectations. Bill is uniquely positioned to help us execute against these priorities, and with him we’ll achieve significant advances for our customers and for Blackboard.

    While the official messaging is ‘full steam ahead’, to me this is a straightforward story that we have already been covering at e-Literate. In a nutshell, the attempted sale of Blackboard this year has failed, and the company has stalled in its turnaround attempts. (more…)

  • Why Is Blackboard Laying Off Staff Despite Improved Market Share Position?

    Over the past two weeks Blackboard had another round of layoffs, likely due to the company missing financial targets. While one estimate places the number at roughly 200, from what I have heard the number is closer to 90 – 100 people let go. I asked the company for commentary on the layoffs and associated reorganization. By email they declined to comment on the number of employees let go but added this comment:

    These changes included the elimination of select positions across the company. We deeply appreciate the contributions made by the affected employees and are supporting them in their transition.

    This is not the first layoff at Blackboard since they were taken private in 2011; rather this is the latest in a series of cuts that have gone well beyond “trimming the fat”. Posts on thelayoff.com and glassdoor paint a picture of high attrition due to routine layoffs and many staff leaving by their own choice. We have written on several of these events here at e-Literate. 90 here, 100 there, 74 . . . it adds up, especially when combined with staff departures.

    To get another view into the company downsizing, consider that Blackboard recently signed a lease that will trim its corporate headquarters by 37%:

    Founded in a Dupont Circle row house in 1997, Blackboard, which has occupied 111,895 square feet at 650 Massachusetts Ave. since 2008, will move into Ogilvy Public Relations Wordwide’s former space on the eighth through 10th floors [70,482 square feet] beginning in December 2015.

    This follows a recent move in its Reston, Virginia facility that cuts its office space there by over 50%.

    In an ironic turn of events, the new headquarters move will put the company into the same building it occupied before 2008, and their neighbors in the building will include former CEO Michael Chasen’s SocialRadar and CBE provider FlatWorld.

    Why More Layoffs When US Market Share Finally Stabilizes?

    (more…)

  • Blackboard Brain Drain: One third of executive team leaves in past 3 months

    In August 2013 Michael described Ray Henderson’s departure from an operational role at Blackboard. As of the end of 2014, Ray is no longer on the board of directors at Blackboard either. He is focusing on his board activity (including In The Telling, our partner for e-Literate TV) and helping with other ed tech companies. While Ray’s departure from the board did not come as a surprise to me, I have been noting the surprising number of other high-level departures from Blackboard recently.

    As of December 24, 2014, Blackboard listed 12 company executives in their About > Leadership page. Of those 12 people, 4 have left the company since early January. Below is the list of the leadership team at that time along with notes on changes:

    • Jay Bhatt, CEO
    • Maurice Heiblum, SVP Higher Education, Corporate And Government Markets (DEPARTED February, new job unlisted)
    • Mark Belles, SVP K-12 (DEPARTED March, now President & COO at Teaching Strategies, LLC)
    • David Marr, SVP Transact
    • Matthew Small, SVP & Managing Director, International
    • Gary Lang, SVP Product Development, Support And Cloud Services (DEPARTED January, now VP B2B Technology, Amazon Supply)
    • Katie Blot, SVP Educational Services (now SVP Corporate Strategy & Business Development)
    • Mark Strassman, SVP Industry and Product Management
    • Bill Davis, CFO
    • Michael Bisignano, SVP General Counsel, Secretary (DEPARTED February, now EVP & General Counsel at CA Technologies)
    • Denise Haselhorst, SVP Human Resources
    • Tracey Stout, SVP Marketing

    (more…)

  • Blackboard’s Big News that Nobody Noticed

    This week was both D2L’s FUSION conference and Blackboard’s BbWorld. The conventional wisdom going around is that there was no big news out of either conference. In Blackboard’s case, that’s just not true. In fact, there was an astonishing amount of very significant news. It’s just that Blackboard didn’t do a very good job of explaining it to people. And that, by itself, is also news.

    (more…)

  • Blackboard’s Perceptis Acquisition Offers Clues into Company’s Strategy

    Yesterday Blackboard announced that they acquired Perceptis, a provider of help desk and financial aid support services for colleges and universities. In and of itself, this is not a huge acquisition. Perceptis has 33 clients, offers services that Blackboard was already offering, and has no substantial new technology. But as we approach BbWorld next week, the move provides some early hints into the strategic direction that the company may highlight at the conference.

    I had the opportunity to talk with Blackboard’s Vice President of Education Services Katie Blot about the move.

    (more…)

  • Two-Year Anniversary of Blackboard Acquisition of Moodlerooms and NetSpot

    Two years ago today, Blackboard made a dramatic change of course with a series of public announcements:

    At the time I described these changes:

    Most of the discussion in articles and blogs follows the meme of Blackboard entering open source, or even the meme of Blackboard acquiring competitors. I think the news is more significant than either of these two memes.

    Blackboard just did a 180-degree turn on their strategy for their core LMS business. They have moved from consolidating all customers into Learn 9.1 to providing products and services that are almost LMS-agnostic.

    Archive of Statements

    Given this dramatic turn of events, I wrote an additional post that captured the public statements (press releases, blog posts) from Blackboard, Moodlerooms, NetSpot, and even Blackboard competitors for the purpose of checking to see if the acquisitions really did signal a true change in strategy and support for open source. This two-year anniversary seems the perfect time to check up.

    Bb’s Previous Open Source View

    Just how big of a change did the announcements represent? Consider Blackboard’s moves regarding alternative LMS solutions in the previous six years. (more…)

  • Update: Blackboard and Washington Post change the employee count

    Well that was a major change. As I noted yesterday, Blackboard described its reorganization efforts to the Washington Post for its Saturday profile of the company and CEO Jay Bhatt.

    Blackboard today is completely reorganized, compared with a year ago, a process that required layoffs in some departments and new hires in others, Bhatt said. The company counts roughly 2,200 employees to date.

    This was interesting to me, since in Fall 2012 Blackboard gave information to both the Washington Business Journal and the Washington Post stating that the company had 3,000 employees. I noted this in my post yesterday:

    That is a significant change, if these stories are accurate, going from 3,000 employees to 2,200 in less than 18 months …

    The Washington Post just issued a correction to their story today that changes the numbers significantly:

    Blackboard today is completely reorganized, compared with a year ago, a process that required layoffs in some departments and new hires in others, Bhatt said. The company counts roughly 3,000 employees to date.

    There is almost no explanation for the change in numbers, other than the following:

    An earlier version of this story incorrectly spelled Adrenna, the learning management platform. It also incorrectly stated how many people are employed at Blackboard. This version has been corrected.

    (more…)