Some Perspective, or “Why Does the Real Enemy Get the Praise?”
I’ve been a little perplexed as I read some negative blog posts and twitter feeds regarding Elluminate
and Wimba’s decisions to allow themselves to be acquired by Blackboard. The general comparison is made between dire predictions about what this acquisition will be like in the future in comparison to how Elluminate and Wimba were previously, or are right this at this particular second-- as though the market were static and these two organizations could have continued as they were ad infinitum. Some of you have even said “Adobe and WebEx are looking better and better.”
The reality is that the market has been changing. I’ve been in the synchronous collaboration space for over 10 years with the last 5 of those years coming at Elluminate focusing on the educational sector, so I’ve had the opportunity to watch those changes in both the corporate and EDU settings. When I joined Elluminate, we competed for your business happily and vigorously against Wimba and open source solutions, knowing that we would win some and lose some but always with a healthy respect for what they had been able to accomplish (and I like to believe that they held equal regard for us as well).
But in the last few years, with the corporate market becoming more saturated with meeting-based web conferencing vendors, we’ve seen Web Ex and Adobe decide that the educational sector looks more and more attractive. With healthy dominance established there, they set out to see what they could do to capture your business as well. So they announced quick, minimalist integrations to a few LMS systems (only the largest) and made passing waves at becoming accessible to users with disabilities. Then they pursued aggressive pricing tactics in the sector (funded by their corporate revenue stream) to try to capture market share from the smaller edu-focused providers Wimba and Elluminate. The market responded by beginning to give them edu business saying “Look they have a Building Block, clearly they are committed to education” or “Look, they have closed captioning, clearly they care deeply about users with disabilities and equal access.”
Really?
* Do they have a full suite of integrations to all the major systems like Blackboard, Moodle, Sakai and D2L along with open API’s to allow you to integrate into whatever LMS or portal you choose?
* Is it WebEx who provides the free 3-seat rooms for educators, an educational network for teachers to connect, dozens of free webinars connecting teachers and leaders in the educational community and attempts to engage with you about what technology will help transform teaching and learning?
* Is the non-streaming captioning in teeny, tiny font found in WebEx actually usable by your users who are deaf and hard of hearing? Did they engage with users, students, teachers and administrators in your organizations to decide how to design and deliver those solutions?
* Is Adobe’s commitment that Connect Pro will work fully for keyboard users and screen reader users “sometime in the next three years” actually acceptable to your users who are blind?
You have to ask yourself—Why can't these be answered positively? Both organizations are certainly more equipped from a resource perspective to do all this and more. The reality is because the educational sector is and always will be a minor portion of the business for the WebEx and Adobe web conferencing products. The oil companies and big pharmaceuticals that conduct meetings, webinars and demonstrations through their products will not drive those requirements to the forefront.
But the size of these sectors have driven Adobe and WebEx to produce some very exciting and cool things like mobile iPhone, iPad and Droid applications that neither Elluminate or Wimba have been able to produce as quickly. And you think those applications are interesting. I can tell by all the emails you send me and blogs you post. You know what? So do I! I would like nothing better than to see our organization provide some of those cool new applications for you--after engaging with you our client base to make sure that we design and deliver them in a way that is pedagogically appropriate and doesn’t interfere with core values like No User Left Behind.
I really believe that the combination of Blackboard, Elluminate and Wimba is going to allow us to do things like that in a timely manner to make sure that there is at least one educationally focused, pedagogically sound, accessibility-minded commercial vendor providing collaboration tools as an option to open source. Blackboard hasn’t squashed that. They’ve enabled it. The alternative wasn’t business as usual. The alternative was that over time, more and more edu institutions, captured by sexy mobile applications and cannibalistic pricing tactics by the corporate providers would have moved to those providers leaving you eventually with only a choice between open source and behemoth corporate providers with no EDU focus. I really believe it’s good for education that there be at least one financially solid commercial provider with an EDU focus. I hope you’ll let our combined organization be that provider or at least give us the chance to prove that we can be.
I am not really a blogger. My usual communication with all of you is in an Elluminate session! I love the collaboration space. I love being a part of hearing about where education is going and how we can help. I love engaging with you directly to figure out the best way to do that. I love the fact that trying to address the needs of users with disabilities is a real value here and not a marketing façade. I love Elluminate and my job more than anything I have ever done professionally. I love our customers and the tremendous loyalty you’ve shown us and the way you are selfless in your efforts to help use make the product better and as result be better able to meet the needs of more users. I sure hope you’ll be willing to continue with us and give us a chance to prove that the combined organization can be all that and more.
All I am saying is give peace a chance….
The combination of the incredible tools developed by Elluminate and Wimba and the backing of Blackboard will allow us to continue all those things while also helping to modernize and address the sexy things you’d like to have like mobile applications, more open API’s, flexible branding, content integrations, etc. Please don’t disengage with us. I want to hear from you. WE ALL want to hear from you. This is going to happen, so we ask you: How can we as a combined entity be the kind of provider you’d like to do business with? Please let us know.
Comments
I would like a detailed analysis of how Wimba and Elluminate can coexist. In particular, why would anybody need to use more than one? I use them in identical manner, though I find one to have a slightly more convenient interface than the other.
Maria-
Wimba and Elluminate have many products that do very different things such as Wimba's Pronto, Voice and Create products and Elluminate's Plan and Publish products. So these really don't "overlap" in terms of functionality. I'm sure there are users who will want to continue to use these products alongside each other.
The products that most people are thinking about when they ask the question you are asking is the virtual classroom (Elluminate Live or Wimba Virtual Classroom). Here there is clearly overlap and it doesn't make sense over the long-term to maintain both of these products with their very similar feature sets and capabilities. Since both companies were actively in the process of creating "next generation" iterations of their virtual classroom solutions, it's an ideal time to "merge" those visions into a single virtual classroom solution that represents the best ideas and technologies from both companies. It's also a great time to consider how any of the other products can and should be expanded/integrated/etc.
Both Elluminate and Wimba have always had highly customer-driven requirements and development processes so whatever the final plan is, it will be presented to and validated by real customers from both organizations. I notice you find one interface more convenient than the other. Now is a great time to help us by providing that input. You can feel free to do so here in the thread or at any time to email me directly at valeries@elluminate.com.
Thanks!
Valarie,
Good post. As a customer (and business owner), I understand what you're saying about the market.
I would guess that most people see/saw Blackboard as the "big, bad corpoprate monster" and Elluminate as the smaller, edu-friendly good guy. It's interesting to get more of a macro view of things where Blackboard is the smaller guy compared with giants like Adobe.
I've only been with Elluminate for about 2 years now, but I've been happy and have been increasingly impressed during that time. I've also attended the two most recent sneak peeks when v.10 and v.9.7 were first publicly introduced. During those sessions you seemed to have a prominent role and therefore, I gathered that you are part of the development team. In that capacity, I was wondering if you had any insight on where things are headed from a devleopment perspective. Do you see it more as building upon what's already here (i.e. keeping .wbd file types and being Java based) or creating something totally new? Or is it too early to tell?
Thanks for your work on developing Elluminate into, what I consider, as the best webconferencing platform available.
John Bovey
Thanks John for the feedback and good questions. You're right that even the combined Blackboard/Elluminate/Wimba entity is the smaller player in comparison to Adobe and WebEx. I think with this combination, we can achieve a great balance of being small enough to be responsive to our EDU clients, and nimble in our response to market and technology changes without being as resource constrained as we have been in the past.
My role is actually currently that of Senior Director of Product Management at Elluminate which means that I lead a team of product managers who engage with clients to see what they need and research the competition and overall market to see where things are headed. With all that data in mind, they determine the contents of future releases and new products that we ought to introduce and write requirements that the software developers use to create real products and product updates that we bring to market.
It's definitely too early to answer your specific product questions because I don't yet know what role I will play in the future organization and Wimba and Elluminate haven't yet "compared notes" on our current products and roadmaps. There are, however, a few guiding principles everyone has agreed to. Blackboard Collaborate will be producing best of breed collaboration tools that are OPEN for ALL LMS users and provide well-documented API's. The organization will continue with a focus on education and its unique requirements (i.e. maintaining values like No User Left Behind). The top priority will be ensuring that all current Elluminate and Wimba customers are provided full support for the tools they already use and as seamless a transition as possible if and when any changes are made to current technologies.
We've also committed to provide a much more complete view of what that future will look (with actual answers to questions like you've asked above) by October at the Educause conference. We'll undoubtedly also conduct some webinars and other outbound communications for those who don't attend Educause so everyone gets the information.
Stay tuned and keep asking questions. Because even if we're not able to answer them all right away, it will give us a great idea of what things are important for you to know when we do go public with future plans.
Valerie
Hi Valerie,
Thanks for your post. I must say this is the first solid argument I have heard presenting any reasons why this merger is a good idea. However, I would like to present my views on some of the arguments you make:
Argument that you are too small to
compete and the only way to increase competition is to decrease the
number of firms. How do Sakai and Moodle compete against Blackboard
in spite of Blackboard's much larger size? Or better yet, do you
believe there is any competition in the LMS market? If not, then how
can the company that is responsible for that lack of competition in
the LMS market help bring about competition in the real time market?
Argument that education is poorly
served by companies who are not education focused. You have some good
criticisms of these competing corporate focused products. If
customers care about those features then these products should be out
competed. Your argument is that customers are presented with the
choice between a flashy corporate style product (Adobe, WebEx) that
will have short comings in educational use and a more homely product
that actually meets the needs of their teachers and students
(Elluminate, Wimba). What that means is you don't trust your
customers to make decisions in the best interests of their students.
I would agree that it seems that products are purchased without a
sufficient trial period by the actual users and that technology
purchasing decisions often rest with non educators. In my mind, this
is how Blackboard (your new company) has achieved such market dominance, a flashy sales
pitch to a few key decision makers.
There are other markets where
corporate products are being used in the education sphere. MS
Sharepoint is being used by some schools as an LMS (discussion
forums, sharing documents, and sharing calendars). The feature
comparison reveals that Sharepoint makes a poor LMS and so hasn't
been able to complete very well, however I welcome MS, Adobe, and
Cisco WebEx attempts to enter the market and create products. These
companies will push the education focused companies (I mean company)
to improve the quality of their offerings.
Argument that the Elluminate team is
full of committed educators and good people. Guess what, so is
Blackboard and yet Blackboard still has a reputation as a company
that provides an inferior product with poor customer service at an
inflated price. Why is that? I believe it is the focus on the
corporate bottom line and their strategy of cornering the market. To
me the belief that Elluminate can change Blackboard sounds kind of
like a woman dating a man with a history of abuse and thinking that
she is going to be the one to change him. The problem with Blackboard
isn't that it has bad people in it, the problem with Blackboard is
that the corporate structure and strategy has made it mostly
irrelevant to Blackboard if their ultimate customers (students and
staff) are unhappy or poorly served.
I am all for hopeful optimism, but we
are all trying to predict the future here. My argument is that
Blackboard will prevail in decreasing competition (just like they did
by removing WebCT and Angel as options for schools) and limiting the
ability for other LMS's to use their real time products. Your
argument is that Elluminate and Wimba will prevail in opening up
Blackboard. The piece of the argument that really lands me on the
negative side is that Bb bought two companies at once (merging code
is very difficult) and paid way too much for the companies (estimated
$30 million value for $116 million). This screams of a business
decision to create a monopoly. You have quite a bit of work a head of
you as Blackboard attempts to quickly turn a profit on your products
and you try to change Blackboard.
Valarie,
Thanks for the repsonse. I would say two main things are important to me pertaining to the future. Not necessarily in order of importance...
1.) Backward compatability: Over the last couple of years I've developed a significant amount of material that has been saved in .wbd files. As I'm sure you know, it takes a lot of time to develop good resources and it would be catastrophic to not be able to use that work in the future.
2.) Pricing: As a small, but growing business, having a price point of $500 for a 50 seat room is doable. But, when I hear of stories like $40,000 to implement Blackboard at a university level... that worries me. Obviously comparing one vOffice to a university-wide LMS installation is not a fair comparison, but I am extremely concerned that smaller scale users like myself could be priced out of the market as things go forward. I've seen people predict that Elluminate will eventually be rolled into Blackboard's LMS, thus having it not available as a stand alone product. That's probably (hopefully?) just people panicing, but I also haven't read any definitive statements from the new company to the contrary. There have been statements about the short term, but nothing about the long term.
I would hope both of these things would be addressed in Oct., if not sooner.
Thanks again.
John
Excellent analysis and outreach, Val. Thanks for taking the leap into the blogosphere!
-Beth