So the news is that Saba (learning management system company) just purchased Centra (real time web conferencing & learning system company). Now you can have all of your e-learning delivered from one bucket – for a price.
My own limited view of this merger is that it’s no big news. The movement in most of the learning technology market is toward "small pieces loosely joined" and cheaper systems, especially systems that can plug into each other.
Many people whose organisations have an LMS or LCMS tell me that they feel locked-in to the vendor’s technology. License fees are increasing and they see no way out. They ask me about open source and whether it’s a viable option. As I expressed before, the business case for open source in learning is basically :
- Information technology infrastructure should not be the largest cost of any human performance or learning project.
- It is not your technology that gives you a competitive advantage but your organisation’s strategy, leadership and the talent of your workforce.
- Using open source from a trusted collaborative partner saves money and leaves the technology open to further development.
- By driving down the cost of software or content, the open source model frees capital for other projects, thereby fostering innovation.
- Most of the market leading products in the learning content management space (and other enterprise applications) are so costly that many organizations cannot pay the price of admission. Let’s face it, most organizations do not need a space shuttle to go to their mailbox.
The Saba-Centra merger also seems way behind many of the open source initiatives that have caught up to and even surpassed the proprietary vendors. Platforms like ePresence, "a content capturing, archiving, and webcasting system that delivers video and presentation media over the internet using multiple streaming formats for multiple platforms", are surfacing every day on the web. I don’t see much for the learner or the client in this merger other than some minor savings on an already pricey platform.
