Saba/Centra Summit 2007

Last week I had the opportunity to do one of the keynotes at the Saba/Centra Summit.  I was not able to attend the first day of the conference, but the keynotes for Day 2 were CLOs from IBM and Deloitte talking about what their organizations were doing in terms of learning and talent management and how Saba played a role.  I opened Day 3 talking about the evolution of talent management software and how to leverage it in a more strategic fashion.  After a Saba keynote about their future vision, HP did a keynote about their journey in learning and talent management.  It just implemented Saba for learning globally and will go live with performance management by the end of the year (it should be one of the largest employee performance management implementations to date).  All of the customer keynotes were impressive in terms of the vision around better integrated talent management.  They were not there yet, but they definitely knew that was where they wanted to go.  This was echoed in other presentations as well such as by customers like Union Bank of California.  Saba is still best known as a e-Learning suite provider, but I was impressed at the level of interest by customers in broader talent management applications.  Some of these companies are the largest and most complex in the world and Saba is one of the few vendors in the space that has relatively large numbers of them using their solutions.