Sales Pitch from Angel

I received this email today from Angel:

Burning the midnight oil worrying about the future of your Learning Management System? Vendor consolidation has left you with fewer options as unknowns increase. Take a moment to consider this: It's not too late to explore options. ANGEL is a collaborative LMS that doesn't require the resource investment of a pure open source deployment. ANGEL is different. Our approach is simple.
  • We Listen: Hundreds of ANGEL features suggested by our customer community.
  • We Respond:> 75% of service requests responded to and resolved in less than 24 hours.
  • We Exceed Expectations: Your success is a measure of our success.
Don't let fear of change stop you. Changing LMS vendors may seem overwhelming, but the vast majority of our customers have found that change is quite easy. We have a track record of simple, quick migration and powerful conversion tools to make it happen.   eom (emphases mine)

This brings up a few questions for me:
  1. Exactly what is a "collaborative LMS?" They are trying to sound somewhat open source-like, but not (and of course, they are not).
  2. Would any of these vendors ever say, "Hey, changing LMS is a bee-atch! But, do it anyway!" ?
  3. Exceeding expectations is easy if expectations are low ... none of these vendors have mature products, so why do we expect so much from them?
  4. As unknowns increase? I would be thrilled if the unknowns just hit a plateau.
When we selected D2L for systemwide implementation, Angel was the second choice of the committee. It would be interesting to compare Angel and D2L on the basis of how much they've progressed over the past 2.5 years since we reviewed them side-by-side. I don't really have an opinion about how that current comparison would turn out, but I'm interested. One thing I remember about Angel is that their sales force was much larger than their technical/coding workforce, but they did have a lot of nice features. I wonder how I got on their email list. This is the first one that I can remember.

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