Present is Prologue

Tag: Mark Strassman

Blackboard CEO’s First 100 Days: Reorganization and Learn Ultra Updates

Just over four years after Providence Equity Partners acquired Blackboard and three years after they brought in Jay Bhatt to replace co-founder Michael Chasen, the company hired Bill Ballhaus as its new CEO at the beginning of January. 100 days in, Ballhaus is starting to make changes to the organization and providing some insights into future corporate directions.

The most significant change is a reorganization that combines strategy, product management and marketing in one group under Katie Blot. In an interview Michael and I had with Ballhaus and Blot earlier this week, they described the primary motivation for the organizational change as the need to more tightly align those functions. Also significant is that this change means the departure of Mark Strassman, SVP Product Marketing & Management, and Tracey Stout, SVP of Marketing & Sales Effectiveness. Blackboard provided the following statement. (more…)

April 22, 2016
After Customer Feedback And Further Delays, Blackboard Changes Learn Ultra Strategy For LMS

A full seven months after BbWorld 2015, Blackboard has yet to move any new functionality for Learn Ultra from “in development” or “in research” to “available” according a new public webinar. That is, Learn Ultra is no further along from a customer delivery perspective than they were in July 2015, when they were already a year late. Furthermore, Blackboard promised at BbWorld 2015 that Learn Ultra would be available to all customers in technical preview mode by Fall 2015 and available for active pilots with students and course content by Spring 2016, yet I have talked to several of Blackboard’s best long-term customers who have no access to Ultra and no updates on plans. What is becoming clear is that Learn Ultra as originally envisioned will not be in General Availability by BbWorld 2016.

I asked Blackboard for statements on the current Ultra status and was able to interview Mark Strassman, Senior VP of Product and Marketing, late last week. Mark described that Blackboard has decided to change their product strategy based on selected customer feedback in technical preview. According to Strassman:

Based on customer feedback on our Learn SaaS offering, we have evolved our strategy to make it easier for institutions to move to Learn SaaS and adopt Learn with the Ultra Experience. Later this year we will provide a new Ultra-inspired theme that customers can use with either Learn 9.1 or Learn SaaS with the Original Experience. This theme will give users of our current product an updated look-and-feel, and make it easier for them to deploy Learn Ultra, either standalone, or alongside existing courses in the Original Experience.

What this means is that Learn 9.1 Original will start to look more like Ultra and Ultra will start to look more like 9.1 Original. Let’s unpack that statement a little. (more…)

February 16, 2016
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:
- Blackboard acquired two Moodle hosting and service providers — Moodlerooms in the US and NetSpot in Australia (although they had different business models).
- Blackboard created an Open Source Services Group, which helps “institutions successfully manage open source learning management systems (LMS) including Moodle and Sakai”.
- Blackboard hired Charles Severance (Dr. Chuck) to lead this new group, and he laid out much of the rationale in his blog.
- Blackboard canceled their end-of-life for the ANGEL LMS product, keeping it available indefinitely.
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…)
March 26, 2014