Monday's meeting of the eLearning

Monday's meeting of the eLearning Forum at the SRI campus in Menlo Park highlighted some of the massive changes eLearning vendors will face as ERP vendors enter the market. Already, LMS purchases are being put on hold while prospects wait for PeopleSoft to release an eLearning package before year-end.

If you think of an enterprise as a value chain, it seems foolish to relegate eLearning to a silo. After all, the promise of standards from Web Services, the Semantic Web, XML, and SCORM is interoperability that lets you glue the former islands of the enterprise into one integrated unit:

ERP and eLearning are going to become joined at the hip. The Fortune 1000 want to deal with vendors that have staying power. Consider this:

(These are the annual revenues of SAP, PeopleSoft, and Siebel. The SmartForce revenue includes SkillSoft. The "eLearning Universe" includes DigitalThink, Franklin Covey, GP Strategies, Learning Tree, New Horizons, Prosoft, Provant, RWD, SmartForce, Centra, Click2Learn, Docent, eCollege, iManage, Eloquent, Raindance, Saba, Secure, SCT, Stellent, Vcampus, and WebEx. In other words, all the pubic eLearning companies combined have less than half the revenue of SAP. Some of the big names in eLearning are mere fleas compared to the major multinationals.)

Why is convergence inevitable? Integration. Economies of scale. One-stop shopping. Vendor viability. Existing relationships. Contracts in place. FUD. Lust for control. Those who don't see the handwriting on the wall are suffering from corporate dyslexia.

On Monday I used a nifty piece of software called Impatica to compress the discussions into steaming audio sync'd to PowerPoint presentations. Sam Adkins' opening presentation was particularly meaty. Take a look. Drop me a note if you'd like information on impatica.

Posted by Jay Cross at August 21, 2002 07:45 PM | TrackBack