Elearning! Magazine: Building Smarter Companies via Learning & Workplace Technologies.
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News What Does Learning Vendor
ment providers took this to heart: the addition of learning manage- ment has been one of the hottest acquisition areas in tech this last year," claims Dr. Kathleen Jones, analyst, Bersin & Associates. "Kenexa, the HR management software and services company, jumped into the 'gotta have learning' fray with the acquisition of e- learning provider OutStart."
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Integration plans may determine your best match Two different integration models are surfacing: SAP and Oracle. "The SAP strategy is bold," reports Josh Bersin, principal, Bersin & Associates. "It represents SAP's need (and desire) to build a clean, end-to-end cloud ERP strategy. It will certainly drive great adoption of SuccessFactors in existing SAP accounts. But there are quite a few disruptive moves here, some of which will take years to implement.
2 Deals
ORACLE-TALEO Oracle is acquiring Taleo, a provider of cloud-based talent manage- ment solutions for roughly $1.9 billion. Taleo's solutions basi- cally help organizations attract, motivate and retain human capital, and will serve to boost Oracle's Public Cloud offering. Taleo has about 1,400 employees serving more than 5,000 customers, including nearly half of the Fortune 100. The deal is expected to close this summer, subject to Taleo shareholder and regulato- ry approvals. Taleo has acquired eight other companies since going public in September, 2005. Today, about 200 million people are registered in its systems. Its online apps, known collectively as Talent Intelligence, are available in 31 different languages and sold in 187 countries.
SAP-SUCCESSFACTORS SAP closed the SuccessFactors deal quickly. The acquisition was completed quickly by merging SuccessFactors with a SAP subsidiary, which will operate as SuccessFactors. SAP also announced its integration plans.
8 March / April 2012 Elearning!
In effect, the combined compa- nies plan to move all their strate- gic talent management invest- ments from SAP HCM and Business ByDesign into SuccessFactors and build Employee Central
(SuccessFactors' central direc- tory product) into its core cloud- based HRMS offering.
KENEXA-OUTSTART Kenexa has entered into a definitive merger agreement with private- ly-held OutStart. When consum- mated, this acquisition will expand Kenexa's reach into the e-learning market and enable it to provide a broader and deeper suite of talent management solutions. Kenexa will integrate OutStart's Learning Management Suite, which includes social and mobile learning solutions, with Kenexa's global talent management solu- tions, including its Performance Management suite.
OutStart, which is based in Boston and has offices throughout North America, Europe and Asia, has more than 300 customers ranging from large global organizations to mid-size companies and
government entities. The com- pany delivers a portfolio of inter-related mobile, social and learning knowledge solutions. Meanwhile, the Kenexa 2x platform was designed to inte- grate all talent management functions and data, including a unified talent record, mobile tools and robust analytics into one single system that provides a consistent user interface, security features and reporting engine while allowing for a cus- tomer's future global expansion.
ASSIMA-KAPLAN Assima PLC has acquired Kaplan Learning Technologies from Kaplan, Inc. The deal covers all assets and intellectual property associated with the STT Trainer and Atlantic Link product lines but excludes the PerformIT product line. Kaplan Learning Technologies' business opera- tions in Atlanta, the U.K. and South Africa will join Assima. STT Trainer and Atlantic Link
are well-established, award- winning collaborative platforms for authoring rich e-learning content currently used by over 200 clients worldwide, includ- ing; Shell International,
Barclays Bank and Heineken.
PEOPLEFLUENT-STRATEGIA Peoplefluent has acquired its learning partner, Strategia Communications, a Canadian- based learning management solutions company that offers a modern SaaS platform. With this acquisition, Peoplefluent hopes to dramatically propel its talent suite from performance assessment to performance improvement through learning. Both Peoplefluent and Strategia share a similar enter- prise customer base, highly com- patible feature sets, more than a decade of leadership and suc- cess in each of their respective markets and a deep commitment to customer satisfaction. As members of the
Peoplefluent team, co-founders Romain Gagnon and Line Savard will remain in their leader- ship capacities and will continue to manage the day-to-day oper- ations of the Learning Solutions business from its headquarters in Montreal. They will report into Doug Ring, chief technology offi- cer of Peoplefluent. The specific terms of the deal were not disclosed.
"This direction is far
Consolidation Mean? Seven major financial transactions have occurred over the last quar- ter. (See "Deals" below). What does this mean to learning executives?
More full talent suite offerings to choose from "The Year of Learning has arrived...[and] the talent manage-
different from Oracle (which already has Fusion HCM ship- ping and is the HRMS market share leader), which plans to maintain and invest in Taleo as a sepa- rate product line. And it fully vali- dates the strategy of Workday, a company that is already growing at breakneck speed and will now become even
more prominent in the marketplace." —Read more at: www.Bersin.com
