This past week in San Francisco Saba held their annual customer conference, Saba People Summit. After several hours of meetings with their executive team, my primary take away is that Saba is returning their focus (in both product development and in marketing) to their core strengths in Learning (formal and informal) and Development (ex: career planning, improving skills, etc.) This is a shift from the 2012 summit, where they launched Saba People Cloud (SPC), which they referred to as: "The first, people-centric Social Enterprise Platform that connects all the people in the value chain and enables strategic people processes". That (fluffy) message clearly did not resonate well, and Saba has responded appropriately by now talking less about "being social" and more about how their platform can help people learn, become better employees and advanced their careers.
This return to their strengths comes at a good time, as customers are looking for a more pragmatic approach to "social software", which I refer to as "Purposeful Collaboration". With purposeful collaboration, platforms and process are put in place with the goal of achieving specific business outcomes. For example, an engineering team could be focused on improving product quality, marketing could be trying to increase the lead pipeline, or customer support could be looking to reduce call times.
For Saba, purposeful collaboration manifests itself around talent management use-cases. For example, instead of just showing us a demo of teams sharing status updates or collaborating on a project, Saba highlighted how SPC can display course catalogues, enabling students to discuss content and provide reviews, plus via seamless e-commerce functionality, courses can be purchased, and once they are completed certifications are displayed on people's profiles.
Saba's product portfolio contains three primary offerings: Saba Enterprise Cloud (SEC), Saba People Cloud and Saba Meetings.
- SEC is their original talent management platform and is what the majority of their customers are currently using. The name is misleading as it is available both on-premises (which is how most of their customers are currently deployed) and in the cloud.
- Saba People Cloud contains all the standard elements of a social platform that you'd expect such as activity streams and file-sharing, plus one of the most robust feature sets around profiles and directories that I've seen. It also offers excellent real time communication integration with Saba Meetings, formerly Centra. Even though Saba People Cloud was launched last year, I got the feeling from several execs (via the tone of their voice, defensive wording, etc.) that it was a bit early, but they now feel SPC is truly ready for customers to start using it. Saba has a Services offering called LEAP which will help customers make the transition from SEC to SPC. However, since SPC is cloud only, customers who wish to continue with their on-premises deployments will have to stay on SEC. This could be a concern for customers, as SPC appears to be where the majority of Saba's development work will be going forward.
Despite a difficult year which included several executive departures (including founder and CEO Bobby Yazdani) as well as investigations into the company's financial practices, Saba People Summit 2013 had quite a positive vibe. The customers I spoke with seemed happy and employees where very proud of the progress they have made on their products. In my opinion Saba People Cloud is quite a capable platform, especially when integrated with Saba Meetings. It should provide a good solution for customers that are looking to provide a modern (cloud-based, socially enabled) Learning and Development solution to their employees and partners.
