Elearning blog: Learning re-imagined

IBM to acquire Kenexa

By John Ambrose

This week’s announcement that IBM is acquiring Kenexa for $1.3 billion has generated a lot of buzz. As I wrote on the Skillsoft blog back in December when SAP announced it was acquiring SuccessFactors, this sends a clear message to other large traditional software/services vendors - it’s all about the cloud. And as Josh Bersin wrote in his blog post on the acquisition, after SAP‘s acquisition of SuccessFactors and Oracle‘s acquisition of Taleo, it’s IBM’s turn to jump into the HR and talent management market.

Organizations are recognizing the significant hard- and soft-cost advantages of procuring software and content in the cloud. For the past decade, SaaS vendors including Skillsoft have been extolling the financial and deployment advantages of cloud-delivery models.

Skillsoft has always been a cloud-based provider and maintains relationships with many talent management vendors, including Kenexa. This relationship and our commitment to our common customers will continue.

IBM acquiring Kenexa, just like SAP’s move did back in December, underscores the importance of integrating talent management with existing mainstream corporate infrastructure. This is good for corporate users as they do not check their consumer tendencies at the front door of the company and expect and deserve a better, more seamless talent management experience.  

Learning content is key to any successful talent management program from recruitment to retirement. Skillsoft will continue to provide this essential ingredient to the talent process for our clients regardless of whether they are an SAP, Oracle or IBM shop. 

This deal, along with SAP’s acquisition in December and Oracle’s acquisition of Taleo earlier this year, confirms that organizations value employee development as a competitive differentiator more than ever before. The industry has moved from tactical (but necessary) human resource administration toward higher-value human capital management (HCM), where developing people, not the process, is the focus.

Exploring SkillPort® 8: Community Features

 

Last week, we focused on the “search” functionality within SkillPort® 8 — a revolutionary cloud-based learning experience that delivers targeted learning — when and where people want to learn. Today, we’ll explore the “community” features of SkillPort 8.

One of the highlights of SkillPort 8 is the integrated collaborative and social learning features. In fact, according to a 2010 ASTD study, workers see the value of using social media for learning and development. More than 80 percent of the survey respondents expect social tools to be adopted by their organization’s learning group within the next three years and nearly 100 percent of the respondents use social tools in their personal lives.

Community and collaboration is woven throughout the learner interface, encouraging participation and bringing organizational context across a wide range of learning content. The community features in SkillPort 8 leverage the 2+ years of experience we have deploying our award-winning social learning feature set, inGenius®, into the programs of over 350 clients around the world.

Motivate, Innovate, Learn: SkillPort 8

By Stephanie Pyle

As consumer applications and social sites have evolved, we’ve become accustomed to new levels of ease of use and intuitive navigation.  As a result, employees are bringing these user experience expectations into the workplace, making it important for organization’s workforce tools to keep pace.     

We have taken this evolution into account and have spent the past months working closely with our customers to incorporate their feedback into our products.  We are proud to announce the culmination of this work, the latest version of our learning management solution, SkillPort 8. 

SkillPort 8 will allow users to learn the way they live their lives – connecting formal, informal, social and mobile learning, and delivering it when, where and how people want to learn. By evolving learning to be user-centric, instead of system-centric, the benefits are threefold: employees can benefit through easy access to resources and increased opportunities to develop themselves; learning departments can benefit through greater adoption and user satisfaction; and companies can benefit through a more productive and efficient workforce.

SAP to Buy SuccessFactors

By John Ambrose

This weekend’s announcement by SAP that it was buying SuccessFactors for $3.4 billion (almost 10x 2011 revenues) has generated a lot of industry analysis and blog posts.  History will judge the ultimate transformative effect of this deal but clearly SAP has thrown down the gauntlet at the feet of every other large traditional software/services vendor. 

SAP’s big message in announcing the deal is it’s all about the cloud.  Josh Bersin, CEO and president of Bersin & Associates, in his December 4 blog post, called the deal a “major shift in the talent management market.”

Analyst Update: Clouds in the forecast. Why should e learning professionals care?

By Jim Zimmermann

 

No, this isn’t your local weather forecast. It’s actually about where IT and learning are moving in the future…

 

Cloud Computing is one of the most talked about subjects among the IT analyst community. (And we should know – we track over 400 analyst firms for SkillSoft’s AnalystPerspectives product and we provide hundreds of analyst headlines each week via the AnalystPerspectives Weekly Scan Newsletter.) And along with all the talk comes a lot of hype and concern.

 

So what exactly is cloud computing, and why should you as an e learning professional care about it?

 

Cloud computing is about moving IT infrastructure and functionality onto the Internet (the term “Cloud” comes from IT diagrams and flowcharts that show the Internet as a cloud-shaped symbol). Many companies – and most likely yours – have closets, rooms, or even buildings full of servers, network equipment and all the other “stuff” needed to provide access to company data and applications. Companies have significant investments in all this equipment, and it tends to become obsolete in very short periods of time. And the investment in people to keep all of the equipment running is usually significant as well.

 

Unless your company is an IT services provider, running an IT infrastructure is probably not your core business. Cloud Computing is a way to move the IT infrastructure out of your organization to a firm that specializes in running IT infrastructures, allowing your company to focus on its core business. Employees then access the IT infrastructure via the Internet (the “cloud” part again). This Internet-based access is also a benefit to companies that have remote employees or employees that are on the road as all employees can work from wherever they have an Internet connection.

 

There are two kinds of cloud computing being touted by analysts – one where the company simply “pays per use” to access equipment owned by a service provider and possibly shared with other companies (only the hardware is shared – data is secured for each client). The other type of cloud computing involves a company using a “private” cloud infrastructure that is not shared with other companies. Although both methods claim to provide good security, companies that are very concerned with security (government contractors or firms that keep lots of information about consumers for example) tend to consider private clouds as a better solution.

 

So where is Cloud Computing going? Gartner is predicting that by 2012, 20% of enterprises will no longer own their IT infrastructure and will access all computing hardware via the cloud (Source: Gartner Highlights Key Predictions for IT Organizations and Users in 2010 and Beyond, January 13, 2010, Gartner). Although analysts love to argue about the percentages, the trend is clear – companies increasingly will be moving their IT infrastructures into the cloud.

 

How does this affect your e learning programs? It depends on your current learning environment. If you have purchased and installed learning management systems in-house, these will need to be “moved” if the IT infrastructure that supports it moves to the cloud. If you are using SkillSoft’s solutions, they already are provided via “Software as a Service”, which is one of three major components of Cloud Computing (the others being Infrastructure as a Service - Iaas and Platform as a Service -PaaS). Since SkillPort and our Books24x7 digital books product are already “in the cloud”, they should fit in well if, or when, your company makes the move to Cloud Computing.

 

How has Cloud Computing impacted you? Are you already in that 20% of companies? I’d love to hear your perspectives in the comments.

Cloudy with a chance of clear skies ahead

Between blog posts by book publisher Tim O’Reilly, and the recent announcement by Google about the pending release of the Google Editions ebook store, there has been a lot of talk recently about “books on the cloud” and the concept of a “cloud library.”  The terms are borrowed from the broader “cloud computing” concept, which encompasses a wide range of managed services, including; software as a service (SaaS), software on demand, and platform as a service (PaaS) technologies. Basically, cloud computing offers new, flexible and generally more affordable ways to build, deliver, and purchase software.   

The truth is that “books on the cloud” are nothing new.  Here at Books24x7, we’ve been doing it for over 10 years.  In the fall of 1999, Books24x7 released its first online, on demand, reference collection.  At launch, ITPro consisted of 200 technical books delivered in a “24x7” web based environment.  In those early days, we didn’t need to do much more than put the content online and offer the solution in a simple subscription-based model to drive huge demand and create raving fans.  As hard as it is to imagine, in 1999 we weren’t all living in a 24x7 on demand web world.  But IT folks and other technical professionals were.  As the early adopters of what are now considered to be rudimentary web technologies -- listservs, text-only email, early HTML websites painfully delivered over dial up networks -- techies the world over were more than ready for a new delivery method for trusted technical content.   Our publisher partners saw the potential, and most jumped at the chance to provide a new means of access  to their readers, while deriving new revenue streams for themselves.

Over the years we have  exponentially grown the number of titles available, as well as the range of Books24x7 topical collections, and enhanced the platform feature set and delivery methods to encompass deep portal integrations, mobile access, and more.   But, from day one, the content has always resided on web servers ready for instant “anytime, anywhere” access.   Today, “books on the cloud” may be the fashionable buzzword; but regardless of terminology, a great idea that puts knowledge in the hands of people who need it most is always in vogue.

By: Pam Boiros