"The idea behind learning on demand is to give employees, customers, and partners just the information they need to do their jobs. Rather than leave the work environment to learn a new process, procedure, or technique, learners can retrieve useful information in the context of their work. […] The sources of information may be online, offline or, perhaps, from a peer or someone else who may have helpful information.

The LCMS Marketplace: Evolution from Hand-Crafted Content toward Productivity and Knowledge-Sharing

Two leading providers of LCMSs and learning technologies have recognized these changes in the marketplace and are combining forces to address them. On July 22, 2008, EEDO and OutStart announced that they were merging. The companies will form a single solution provider that will focus on these new trends in corporate training technology. […] In this research bulletin, we will take a closer look at the notion of learning on demand and provide analysis of how the companies plan to service their customers. […]"

"We believe that this merger creates a company with the size and R&D resources to help solve the ever-increasing demand on training departments to offer training content and courses in many contexts to vastly different users. There is much work yet to do, however. The combined companies will need to support an extensive, converged product suite while developing new capabilities. As with any technology product combination, the merged company will need to communicate its product plans to its customers and help them make decisions that will best meet their needs.

On the positive side, both companies have a strong history of providing enterprise-class products to a large customer base. While the LMS vendors move in a different direction, focusing their new R&D on talent management features, the combined OutStart and EEDO will focus on content technologies - addressing the problem of helping organizations manage, distribute, and use learning content to drive business change.

The development teams for the combined new company will currently remain intact - an important note for existing customers. Management also plans to begin integration of the product portfolio immediately - so, for example, ForceTen users will be able to expand their learning environment by incorporating Participate (OutStart's social software platform) to enable informal learning.

Bottom Line - The learning content management systems market is clearly evolving toward learning on demand. The combination of EEDO and OutStart creates a real leader that can help drive great adoption of these important technologies into corporate learning."