Research & Surveys
Customer issues, key things and predictions for LMSs

In its latest newsletter The Company of Thought analyses five customer issues, five key things and three predictions about learning management systems (LMSs). Access the results of the analysis performed by the prestigious think tank.

 

Five key things

  • Price Wars are in full bloom not just in the US. They are now spreading globally - even in the UK. However, there is one difference in the UK. In the UK, LMS vendors can still charge whatever they want for features that are “free in the US LMS market” – for example, an m-learning app.
  • In the corporate arena, there has been an increase in the number of LMS vendors tossing in content free as part of their strategy to woo customers. There’s also been a slight increase in the “buy courseware first, and the LMS is free” approach.
  • CMI-5 is gaining adopters in the e-learning market. The problem is that consumers are not buying into CMI-5 - mainly because they can’t understand it, or are aware of it. Moreover, the authoring tool space is, in general, holding back.
  • The “Big Dogs” in the market are exploring the lower reaches. They are now willing to go after consumers in the small and medium sized business (SMB) sector - especially small businesses. As a result, pricing is falling in those markets - although they remain high for pure “Enterprise” applications.
  • Consumers in both B2B and B2C markets are steering away from LMS vendors that they perceive as “internal” – that is, employee-based only. The new fear words among buyers are “Corporate Training”. If an LMS vendor is tagged with that epithet, then people in B2B and B2C won’t buy.

 

Five key customer issues relating to LMSs are:

  • Mobile learning and its role.
  • Security and Encryption - the latter still lags in mobile learning.
  • Deep learning (also known as machine learning in the consumer market) is increasing in the LMS space.
  • The LCMS is on the rise but its continued rise depends on LCMS vendors developing SaaS authoring tools.
  • A continuing number of consumers are entering the LMS space for the first time.

 

Three TCoT predictions

  • Overall performance feature sets in the LMS space is slowing down. We still believe that this has a place in the market - just not as strong a place as it was thought, say, one year ago.
  • Venture capital (VC) funding continues at a fast pace. Expect the vendors you would least expect to secure VC funding.
  • Smaller size vendors (mainly learning platform producers) are going with a flat rate price model - where the consumer pays one rate for x number of users. This is a new version of the bundle pricing model used since the industry began. Expect this trend to grow – especially among learning platform vendors but with LMSs too.

 

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