I must confess it is now four months since I received an in-depth demonstration from the people at Saba of their People Systems Suites. The new versions have been released now for a while, so it may be old news to you, but I was interested enough at the time to take a whole load of notes, so I thought I should share some of these with you.

First off, it’s worth noting that Saba does not seem to have been suffering like so many of its competitors through the downturn:

• It gained 113 new customers in 2010, which was a record year.
• It’s SaaS (Software as a Service) offering, launched a few years ago to support medium-sized enterprises, now 4m users. Across all applications the total now stands at 17m.
• The company is debt-free.

For many of us who have been involved in e-learning for quite some time, the ‘big LMS’ has disappeared off the radar to some extent, particularly with the increased focus on informal and collaborative learning. What interested me was the extent to which Saba has been remodelling its applications to reflect a very different view of what ‘people systems’ could consist of in the years to come.

As they say on their site:

“Today's reality is that you must surround people with both structured and unstructured learning experiences — combining formal and compliance learning with informal and collaborative learning — so they are empowered to rapidly access precisely what they need to learn, and motivated to want to learn. Addressing this tall order takes a new breed of Learning Management System (LMS).”

Of course, this is easier to say than to do. As Saba point out, even if the tools are right, it’s still down to customers themselves as to whether they allow a free-flow, bottom-up learning culture to flourish, or whether they stick with the formal and top-down.

So what are Saba up to with their latest software?

• Getting mobile: Their Centra web conferencing system and performance applications are available for iPhone and iPad, with Android and Blackberry in the works. They’re also keen to make it possible for whole bodies of content to be downloaded and made available on mobile devices iTunes style.
• Embedded social collaboration throughout the modules.
• The ability to hunt down expertise..
• Bridging competency gaps through informal as well as formal means.
• Easy integration of live and self-paced approaches within blended solutions.
• The use of widgets, Outlook add-ins, etc. to provide embedded functionality such as providing instant feedback (‘Saba Impressions’).
• User-generated content submission with peer ratings.
• Social network analysis.

I know that much of this functionality is available through low-cost and open-source software, much of it not specifically learning or performance-orientated, but that’s not how a lot of large corporates see the world. They want an integrated suite of modules designed specifically for enterprise use and they’re prepared to pay for this.

Contrary to my expectations, I came away from my online session with Saba believing surprised how close we were in terms of our vision for the future of learning and development in the workplace. Whether Saba can persuade their customers to do any more than use their products for compliance training is the real challenge. They are definitely giving it a go.

More on the LMS later this week as I look at Totara.