This week Peoplefluent (a $100M+ talent management software company, built from the combination of Authoria and Peopleclick) announced the acquisition of Strategia, a small but very successful enterprise learning management systems company. Strategia was a Canadian enterprise LMS company with large clients like Bombardier.
What this acquisition shows is two trends in the market. First, companies no longer want to purchase talent management software from multiple vendors - so Peoplefluent found that its customers and prospects were demanding an integrated LMS.
Second, it points out the continued growth and health of the learning management systems (LMS) market. While not every LMS vendor is growing at the same rate, vendors like Taleo, CornerstoneOnDemand, Saba, SumTotal, Meridian, Certpoint, Oracle, and SAP all report growth in their LMS businesses. We have not resized the market for 2012 quite yet (it is very close to $1 billion), but I would venture to say we will see a good 10-15% growth this year. And this does not include the new business being generated by companies like Blackboard, Wisetail, Adobe, Citrix, and all the new startup social learning platforms.
As we have talked about for years, the learning management systems (or "learning platform" market) is very big and continues to grow. New applications like extended enterprise training (training of customers, resellers, channel partners) and resale of electronic content (companies like The Economist who are launching new e-learning offerings) is growing even faster than the corporate market. And the need for easy-to-use, dynamic, highly personalized electronic content is accelerating due to the growth in mobile platforms like the iPhone, Android, and iPad.
Some day the corporate LMS market and the market for electronic books will further converge, and some vendors are moving in that direction... and right now nearly every vendor is building in new social features, mobile device support, and further features for customization and personalization.
It's a good time to be shopping for (and selling) learning platforms - and with the training spending up by 11% this year (read the just released 2012 Corporate Learning Factbook for more), we expect this market to continue to accelerate in 2012.