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Showing posts from March, 2011

Chatting with John Baker about the future of D2L

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Last week I had the opportunity to chat with John Baker, CEO of D2L for 30 minutes or so. I was telling him how I am frequently contacted by various people about two main questions: 1) my experiences over the past 7.5+ years as a D2L client (now ended, unless an unemployed person can still be a "client"). 2) my opinions about the future of D2L, especially from an investment perspective. In particular, these questions tend to fall into two main categories: => a) do I think D2L is going to sell out to the highest bidder (this Q has been around for all of those 7.5+ yrs.), and => b) is D2L preparing to issue an IPO (initial public offering of stock) and go public? John and I talked at length about these things. I told him that the speculation about an IPO seemed to be especially hot right now. He told me that this is not something that they have even talked about, and that he has no interest in even looking at that possibility at this time. For a company l

LMS for Sale - But Probably Not D2L

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An LMS company with a code name of LPO Co. is for sale , according to the Wavepoint website. I'm pretty sure that it's not the London Philharmonic Orchestra LMS, and I'm also pretty sure that it isn't Desire2Learn. There are always rumors (okay, often, not always) about whether D2L owners are going to take the money and run. At first blush, I think it's pretty easy to see why some people might jump to the conclusion that D2L is the unnamed company on this website, based on some of the sales info related to the mystery company, such as: "a private North American based technology firm" (notice they don't say a U.S. company, so Canada comes to mind, and D2L is privately held). "a leading provider of Learning Management System (LMS) technology with prestigious clients" (D2L is generally considered to be the #2 LMS company (at least size-wise) and all of their user base considers themselves to be prestigious, of course). " Since 2001, LPO Co