May 31, 2006

In the B2B segment today, the practicality of on-site or face-to-face training is rapidly decreasing. One of the most important reason is overall cost. Gas prices probably won't be going down anytime soon. The learning or training function is very big on travel and lodging.

"When our clients focused on classroom training, either trainees would fly into a central location or trainers would fly all over the country to deliver personal classes," says Rajeev Arora, VP of Marketing for niche eLearning specialist Elluminate.

This of course means racking up huge travel bills as well as losing important employee productivity. This is simply because when people are in a central location for training, they simply aren't doing their jobs.

Naturally, those aren't the only limitations of traditional on-site learning. Add to that the problems of reuse and on-demand access to all forms of training content.

Elluminate's solution to the problem is to deliver an Internet-based training platform for the B2B segment of things, as well as to other sectors of the economy and government. This isn't necessarily courseware! Unlike eCornell for example, Elluminate isn't in the business of supplying learning content and pedagogical models.

Elluminate is focused, rather, on the means of delivery of existing training content.

The Elluminate model is simply to allow trainers to deliver their materials online, much as in a WebEx-type environment. However, Elluminate has given specific thought to the training needs of its customers and programmed these into the environment. "We manage each connection's bandwidth individually to assure a good experience for each trainee," says Arora, by way of example. "That makes sure everyone stays in synch."

This can be important in scenarios in which remote employees, to name one possible group, are not operating on connections as fast as those of in-office employees. Elluminate's technology keeps these different groups on the same page and allows the trainer, or person in charge of the presentation, to keep track of where everyone is.

Elluminate supports the delivery of many kinds of rich content, including productivity documents, voice, and video. Arora points out that video training isn't always a killer app. "Amazingly enough, video is not that important," he says. "More often than not, companies might use video at the beginning of the session so you can see the instructor and let the students introduce themselves, but afterwards the focus is on other content."

The content varies, naturally, but it can include Flash as well as documents authored in Microsoft and OpenOffice environments.

Of course, video is indispensable in some environments. For example, some of Elluminate's healthcare customers use video to illustrate relevant procedures.

Elluminate's application is built in Java and is voice integrated, meaning users needn't have a phone. It also features archiving, which is a sine qua non for training.

"With an archive, you can learn on your own time," points out Arora. "You might have a sales meeting or other appointment and need to access the content later." The reusability enabled by archiving also makes for cost savings, since a training session can be captured once and delivered serially well into the future.

One trend that we've noticed in e-learning is that the technology, once introduced, spreads rapidly to other areas of the enterprise. In Elluminate's case, companies often buy the e-learning platform for employees but then extend it directly to end-users. Arora mentiones Novell (SUSE Linux) and Sun (Solaris) as companies who have used Elluminate to train users on specific products.

Apple is also an Elluminate customer. The company's experience gives Arora an opportunity to talk about the value of desktop sharing. "Apple trained retail store managers on the Tiger release, but the operating system wasn't out yet," he recalls. "But the trainers had it on their desktop, and they shared it with everybody."

It's natural to wonder how companies feel about exposing their sensitive training content in an online medium. Elluminate offers a hosted model in which the company's ASP center keeps the data as well as a model in which the customer buys the software and installs it on their own servers, behind their own firewall and with company-specific access control rules in place.

With companies spending more time training (remember, the Baby Boomers and their accumulate experiences are retiring), an online delivery platform offers cost advantages plus built-in risk mitigation factors (like the software licensing model outlined above).

"Sun does classes eight hours a day, five days a week," concludes Arora. "We offer a solid and reliable environment for that."

Source: Line 56