Enterprise Social Learning – Poised for Growth

The Enterprise Social Learning Space has come out of the closet. The big boys are paying attention to this domain as we saw Microsoft acquiring Yammer last month for $1.2 Billion and Oracle and Salesforce.com have also jumped into the fray with the acquisition of Vitrue (for $300 Million) and Buddy Media (for $689 Million) respectively.

While the spotlight was on Yammer, you might have missed the developments at Socialtext. I received this message from Michael Idinopulos, GM & Chief Customer Officer at Socialtext (it was a mass mailer to all users). According to Idinopulos, “It’s an exciting time! The capital markets are validating enterprise social in a big way. Socialtext has received a strategic investment from Bedford Funding. Our deployments are growing by leaps and bounds. Most important, our customers are integrating Socialtext into their core business processes at warp speed.” Socialtext will be integrated into Peoplefluent’s (owned by Bedford) Human Capital Management (HCM) Suite, which focuses on offering tools to help companies recruit better.

June also saw Jive’s stock go up on the possibility of an acquisition. SAP is already in the game with Jambok that came into the SAP orbit through SuccessFactors. We also have players like Saba touting their social learning platforms.

There is no dearth of action in the enterprise social learning space. There are vast swaths of industries that remain out of bounds for enterprise social learning tools because of regulatory and legal hurdles. The real winner in this race will be the one that can address challenges pertaining to security and control. Its a strange conclusion considering the product category!

Srinivas Krishnaswamy

Whats Cooking at Saba?

Last week’s big news was SuccessFactors joining the SAP mother ship. It wasn’t long ago when SuccessFactors acquired Plateau, thereby announcing its presence in the enterprise learning space. There are interesting possibilities for SuccessFactors notwithstanding the painful integration challenges ahead. So what’s happening at Saba?

Today, Bobby Yazdani, CEO of Saba, gave a talk on Saba People Cloud.  According to Bobby, People Cloud is designed to help organizations implement what he calls a “transformative workplace”. Cutting through the jargon, all it means is that Saba will be unveiling a unified platform for talent management, learning management, social networking, and enterprise collaboration. The key idea behind this platform is that content is indexed around people profiles rather than the other way around which is how information is organized in traditional platforms like SharePoint. Clearly, Saba is not burdened with the integration challenges faced by SuccessFactors. However, they have been relatively late to the SaaS party and I believe are catching up with the likes of Cornerstone OnDemand.

Bobby highlighted some key drivers behind Saba’s initiative.

• The notion of top down talent and learning management is at risk and they will cease to exist in 4 to 5 years’ time.
• Email and voicemail will become history and collaboration platforms will rule the future.
• Information centric management, as seen in large companies, will no longer deliver competitive advantages. People and ideas are the key.
• The “new workplace” is an always-on, trusted workplace and is both global (by enabling collaboration between dispersed teams) and local (by encouraging localized approaches to solving problems). Boundaries between partners, customers, and employees will cease to exist in this new workplace and functional silos will be replaced by fluid cross-functional teams.

Srinivas Krishnaswamy