Blackboard’s recent earnings, overall growth of CMS industry

http://www.cpwire.com/archive/2003/11/4/1430.asp

This news release basically backs up what was coming out of Blackboard’s conference a few months back, that they are making money and finally turning a profit. But I thought it was worth posting because of this other line – “Blackboard`s yearly revenue was $620,000 in 1998 and $69.2 million in 2002” or in other words, a 11,047% growth in revenue in 4 years …
Continue reading “Blackboard’s recent earnings, overall growth of CMS industry”

California State University Signs System Wide Deal with Blackboard Inc.

http://www.cpwire.com/archive/2003/9/24/1396.asp

“The California State University system has adopted the Blackboard Learning System and the Blackboard Portal System to meet the e-Education needs of more than 414,000 students and 46,000 faculty and staff.”

Wow. There have been quite a few large CMS RFPs and competitions over the last year (Wisconsin, Minnesota, MiCTA to name a few) but California’s always the biggie. I seem to think, though, that this announcement is more a formalization of something that had already been happening at many of the campuses concerned, and so maybe isn’t quite the coup it first sounds to be. – SWL

– via [Online Learning Update]

Blackboard to Launch Learning Content Management and e-Portfolio System for Academic Market

I had heard talk recently of Blackboard entering the ‘content management’ marketplace, and the speaker was puzzled why they would want to do this. From the looks of there announcement, they are not necessarily trying to compete with your standard web content management system that serves your public web presence (thought it’s not clear that it couldn’t do that too) but instead taking the step to add learning content management in behind the course management and portal systems. Interesting to me, they seem to have made the move to consider students as just another potential set of content authors, and so the proposed technology to manage learning content also serves your e-portfolio and virtual hard drives for learners. Interesting strategy. – SWL

(As an aside, their attempts to ‘eat their own cooking’ are perhaps leaving them with indigestion – clicking on the ‘standards‘ link on the  right-hand side of the page reveals perhaps more than they wanted to of the content management structure. At least at 9:40 am PST)

Blackboard Announces Revenue of $22.6 Million For Second Quarter 2003

Just as David Carter-Tod mentioned in a comment on an earlier post about eCollege’s latest earnings statement, Blackboard has now come out with this revenue announcement and a statement about “positive cash flow.”

Maybe someone can explain the difference in the two announcements to me (I know that one of them, eCollege, is publicly traded and thus announces ‘earnings per share’ while Blackboard is still privately held, and thus will not) – does this announcement amount to being ‘profitable?’ Can you tell I get trounced in the stock market 😉 – SWL

Blackboard and SCT integration

Via Wilbert Kraan at CETIS comes news of the announcement that a certain amount of integration between SCT Banner and Blackboards CMS will now be available through the use of some connector technology from the recent SCT acquisition Campus Pipeline. This is definitely of interest in and of itself, but the article is well worth a read for anyone wanting a good overview of the field of SIS/CMS integration. To be fair, it is still fairly early days (we’ve only been promised this sort of interoperability for 5 years or so) but we are still yet to see the full promise of standards-based interoperability come to fruition. Someday. – SWL