Interview with Bobby Yazdani, President and CEO of Saba, regarding the company's recent announcements about its human capital development management solution and the release of Saba Performance 4.1.

e-learning: Why is Saba expanding upon its LMS platform to offer human capital development and management solutions?

Yazdani: The original problem we started solving was that large businesses had certain activities and expenditures in providing training services within their businesses and their extended businesses to customers, distributors, and dealers. So, our original promise was to help them streamline those business processes that use the Internet as a new medium to deliver the tools, services, and content, and to mass customize that content.

We have expanded our various product offerings this year to not only help customers manage the learning process but also manage a number of very critical business processes around knowledge transfer activities. We now have a product suite available that performs content management. It helps streamline activities between a subject matter expert to knowledge content, or "nuggets" of knowledge.

If you think about a very complex product like a telephone switch, or the latest and greatest aircraft, or any type of complex product, a significant amount of money gets invested in content that's associated with that complex product. Companies can help their internal employees - their sales people, their customer service people, their distributors, their customers - to be able to install, to be able to get trained, to be able to have repair manuals, and many other forms of knowledge content working to absorb or service these new products.

Our content management product line is being introduced to large and small businesses that offer complex products and need a streamlined process to capture the knowledge content associated with that complex product or service, and publish it into a learning management system, so that the learning management system can deliver it. These business processes are connected.

Business process number one is to capture the knowledge, assemble it, and publish it. Business process number two is to be able to take that knowledge content, deliver it, and mass produce it.

e-learning: Can you tell us more about your new product, Saba Performance 4.1?

Yazdani: Saba Performance is a performance management system that is in limited production. We've only announced one client right now. It addresses the need for companies to align their trading and learning activities as a business strategy. What do companies need to deliver to be able to gain market share, to be able to retain customers, and retain employees?

So, here's what we've done: Just think about a Web site wherein every employee can point to it and be able to look at all the strategic intent from the point of the CEO. Managers, the functional units, will be able to take those rules and break them down into tasks, activities, and objectives that are required to achieve those goals. Individual employees can see managersÕ training plans for the year, their goals and objectives, the business' processes and performance, and even the reward system associated with achieving those goals and objectives.

The leaders of organizations can use these tools to help large organizations achieve alignment. And alignment is a key business problem that we are trying to solve - alignment in terms of the competencies required to achieve goals and objectives at large, alignment in terms of the activities and the tasks that need to be synchronized globally. When large businesses get out of alignment, these tools will help them realign themselves.

e-learning: How is your product line constructed? How does it work with your existing platform?

Yazdani: The way the product line works is there's the basic Saba platform product, and the applications are built on top, so the first even number is associated with the platform number. We have a suite of products on a platform product. The platform product provides a flexible environment so we can continuously add more innovation into the platform.

e-learning: So you have four products on your basic platform - Saba Learning, Saba Performance, Saba Content, and Saba Resources.

Yazdani: That's right. Some are content, some are performance, some are learning, and the last product, Saba Resources, is in research and development. Basically, it's a resource management/workforce management product. We see learning as one dimension of four very key critical business processes within these large businesses to manage their human capital and try to optimize the performance of their human capital - not only in their employment but also in the extended business of their customers, dealers, and distributors.

e-learning: With Saba Content it looks like you have e-learning content management system (LCMS) capabilities on top of your LMS platform. Will that affect your relationships with LCMS vendors?

Yazdani: Yes, we do have our own content management system. What basically happens is that we still integrate with WBT Systems [an LCMS vendor] because we have XML capabilities. Our position is we are going to offer sufficient options to our customers. If a customer wants to go with the other businesses, we have no basic technological barrier to integrate with other systems as long as they are Internet-based systems that use HTML.

What's going on is that as the industry is maturing, the customers' demands are increasing. They demand from suppliers much tighter integrated solutions, a faster rate of innovation, and a much broader set of product offerings, meaning they want to get higher value out of their investment.

What we need to be able to do is to offer a 'fire-value' product at a lower cost. And lower cost is not just the cost of software, but the cost of integration and maintenance throughout the life cycle of the project. ItÕs hard to integrate most business software, and it's expensive. In the lifecycle of the project, the products are evolving, the infrastructures are evolving, and itÕs crucial for us to maintain the speed of innovation for the industry to grow.

e-learning: Can you tell us about Saba's acquisition of HPG?

Yazdani: This is SabaÕs first acquisition. We saw exceptional methodology being used by HPG for a number of years that has been adopted by some 700 businesses for peak performance management. What that is, as far as methodology works, is you model a benchmark based on your top performers, and taking that benchmark, you can help others - the other individuals in your organizations - be able to achieve exactly what you benchmarked. We use these methodologies now in our performance management system.

Each organization has its own cultural issues, business processes, and environmental issues. The methodology is independent of these because it notices what the top performance is meeting and basing it on the context of that difference. So, itÕs not looking at the industry and throwing something generic at the customers. WeÕre saying that you already have a solution. Look at your top performers and fill the benchmark based on those top performers.

http://www.elearningmag.com/BobbyYazdani.asp