LMS II Committee Meeting
Phone Call to Gartner Group
March 17, 2005

Attending: Cris Guenter, Brooke Banks, Bill Evans, Bev Thornton, Jean Irving, Laura Sederberg, Kathy Fernandes. (From Gartner: Ron Yanowsky and Carter)

Web site: http://www.gartner.com/

As far as scalability, both Blackboard and WebCT had a pretty clear vision.  

Blackboard is a public company, profitable and stable with 1500 higher education customers. They have an OEM (Xythos) file sharing system. Not as fully featured as WebCT. For future growth the company may look to markets outside of Higher Ed. Quality of their recent releases has been questionable. Version 6 was poorly received initially. They rushed it as they were focused on their IPO needs.

WebCT is a privately held company. Financials are hidden. They are not operating in the black, yet they are improving and are in a better place than they were. They took a big risk moving to enterprise wide Vista a few years ago. They have about the same market share as Bb, 1500 Higher Ed. Customers. They are solid with their content management system being built in, having Oracle underneath. Customers report positive results. There is significant product change in Vista, or CE6.

Both Bb and WebCT pour money into marketing, not R&D initially, to get their market shares up. Now, they can’t take their market share for granted, as there is competition with Portal systems (not just the LMS or CMS); library systems integration; etc.

Moodle is NOT scaleable NOW. It is designed for smaller institutions. It is written in PHP as a low-end solution for now. It has a large international support community, but not in the USA yet. There are commercial support options.

Sakai will deliver a solution down the road. They are at version 1.5 now with 70 institutions so far in small pilots. In fall they will release 2.0 and do some larger scale pilots with some pieces of PeopleSoft. It is not mature yet.

Both Blackboard and WebCT have installations with PeopleSoft. 400 institutions are using uPortal (open source).

Desire2Learn was designed as an enterprise version of CMS from the beginning. They have heard great things. They have a good track record, but they are a very small company of unknown financial security. A more modern product, they are Microsoft-based, which many institutions don’t trust. High reliability is NOT there yet. They are in a different league than Bb or WebCT, still.  

Bb and WebCT may lose up to 20% of their market share to Sakai and others over the next few years.

Bb is ahead with vision (?), but not as good with execution. Usability and ease of use.  

WebCT is not as flamboyant, but more thorough/complete with execution. Customers are calmer. More tools for content delivery and a variety of communication styles.

For a pedagogical vision, Sakai is driven to become a killer application. Just, not yet.

Submitted by Laura Sederberg