Saba Drives Significant Momentum in EMEA With Strong Customer Wins, New Offices & Partnership

Oct. 10, 2011 - PRLog -- LONDON, UK, — Saba , the premier People Cloud provider, today announced continued momentum in the EMEA region during its first quarter of fiscal year 2012, which ended August 31, 2011. Milestones achieved in the quarter in EMEA included increased adoption of Saba solutions, new alliance partnerships, and the opening of two new offices. Saba also enhanced product capabilities across Saba’s suite of People Cloud applications and increased the number of worldwide users to 23 million, as organisations increasingly turn to Saba to better leverage their most important assets — their people and people networks.

According to PwC’s 14th Annual Global CEO Survey, organisations are increasingly realising that despite high unemployment in mature markets like the United States and Western Europe, there are still major skills shortages around the world. Simultaneously, in high-growth markets like China, Brazil, and India, there is fierce competition for a limited pool of top talent. This means that organisations cannot rely on recruiting and hiring from the outside and must be much smarter about internal talent reviews, calibration, learning, knowledge sharing, and mobility.

“Retaining and nurturing the best people and focusing on people as the core strategy are critical in today’s competitive market,” said Bobby Yazdani, CEO and founder of Saba. “We are enabling our customers to cultivate a knowledge-sharing and learning culture to address global challenges of hyper-competition, workforce complexity, and shorter product life cycles. Our rapid customer adoption in EMEA is validation that our strategy is working, as we begin to realise our vision for the industry’s first, unified People Cloud offering that enables organisations to become transformative, smarter, and more adaptable to the changing world of work.”

Significant Customer and Partner Growth
Over the past six months Saba has witnessed rapid adoption of its People Cloud applications across EMEA, adding new customers and partners, as well as seeing increased adoption of its broad solution set by existing customers.  New customers include organisations such as Apollo-Optik (Germany’s leading optician); Axel Springer AG, Lancashire County Council, Landesamt fur Finanzen, Metro Ag,  PKO Bank Polski (Poland’s largest bank), and Springer Medicine (the leading CME-Academy provider)  Saba also announced an important new partnership with British Telecom  to provide a fully managed people management solution as part of BT Learning Solutions.

“We chose Saba People Cloud Applications because it is on a unified platform for learning and development, performance appraisal, and talent management. In the future, we will be able to train our workforce more comprehensively and offer them more opportunities for personal development,” said Erich Ehbauer, CIO, Apollo-Optik. “We also wish to continually optimise our customer service, which will give us a strategic edge. Saba People Cloud Applications are highly scalable and internationally available. We can use the applications easily and flexibly in our franchises."

“Saba provides us with an enterprise-scale solution based on a holistic vision around people management. They offer a solution that is organically built, providing a truly unified experience across all people processes, infused with collaboration and enterprise social networking capabilities,” said Sundar Balasubramanian, director of BT Learning Solutions. “We have implemented various Learning Management Systems previously and have in-depth knowledge of the various technologies in this space. We were looking for a modular platform that can grow with the needs of our customers without requiring significant investments in integration.”

New Offices
To meet growing demand, Saba has moved to new offices in Paris and Munich.

“As demand for our innovative People Cloud applications continues to increase, we have made significant investments in our sales and services teams to ensure we maximise our market coverage, whilst at the same time continuing to offer the highest levels of customer service,” said Phil Richardson, vice president of EMEA region, Saba.

Key Product Enhancements
Saba introduced several new industry-leading capabilities in the first half of 2011 to help organisations increase performance and improve the visibility of people across the enterprise, including:

Saba Learning Management
-Introduced the general availability of Saba Social Learning, an integral and powerful component of the extended enterprise’s total learning environment. It leverages enterprise social networking to provide more collaborative, immediate, and context-relevant learning methods to improve business results.
-Advanced certification management and compliance capabilities, including ability to weight individual courses, adding sequencing to make it easier to manage complex certification, enhancements to SF 182/EHRI reporting, and support for regulations such as EU Right to Learn.
-Simplified user experience and workflows that include commonly used workflows such as end-user registration, Web-based training (WBT) launch process, enhanced search, and improved prescriptive rules to simplify bulk enrollment.

Saba Real-Time Collaboration
-Enhanced integration between Saba Learning Management and Saba Centra to seamlessly access blended learning programs, knowledge assets, and important documents. In addition, unified search functionality enables users to search across all formal and informal learning content.

Saba Testing & Assessment
-Added best-of-breed testing and assessment capabilities, giving users the seamless ability to also test, assess, and certify skill levels, sales force readiness, and learning effectiveness.

Saba Talent Management
-Added new capabilities in succession planning, including the ability to conduct talent reviews across the enterprise; calibrate individuals or groups in teams or across the enterprise to easily identify tiers of top performers, steady contributors, and areas for development; and introduced enhancements to Saba’s rich and deep dynamic people profile, including profile complete notification and additional fields to support talent review and calibration.
-Detailed tracking of competencies by assigning groups to people, jobs, locations, or even groups of people. This plays a critical role in strategic planning and allows a finer grade of people understanding across the organisation.  

Industry Accolades
-Saba named “Major Player” in IDC’s “Integrated Talent Management Report, Feb. 2011”  
-Finalist, Best of Elearning! 2011 Awards; winner for Saba Social
-Cited as a leader in all three categories of “The Forrester Wave™: Talent Management, Q2 2011” Report (May 2011)
-Recognised as a Leader in Gartner’s 2011 “Magic Quadrant for Corporate Learning Systems”
-2011 Launch Pad Award at Enterprise 2.0 Conference
-2011 Stevie Award for Favorite New Software as a Service for Saba Social
-Cited as “Best Advance in Social Learning” from Brandon Hall

Supporting Quotes
“There is strong integration between learning and development for development planning. Customers continue to cite this as a strength. The offerings provide innovative use of social software concepts to provide ongoing feedback to employees.”
Gartner Employee Performance Management Magic Quadrant, March, 2011

The Forrester Wave: Talent Management, Q2 2011
“Organisations looking to utilise their talent to be ready for their roles and provide the performance desired should look at how learning and social engagement can support knowledge sharing and visibility across the workforce. Saba is helping organisations establish this new talent engagement approach that can foster agility and improve the speed of business across employees, suppliers, customers, and partners.”
Mark Smith, CEO and chief research officer, Ventana Research, October 2011

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Saba  enables organisations to build a transformative workplace that leverages the advent of social networking in business and the ubiquity of mobile to empower an organisation’s most mission-critical assets — its people. The company provides a unified set of People Cloud Applications including learning management, talent management, enterprise social networking, and real-time collaboration delivered through the Saba People Cloud. Saba solutions help organisations leverage their people networks to become more competitive through innovation, speed, agility, and trust.
Saba's premier customer base includes major global organisations and industry leaders in financial services, life sciences and healthcare, high tech, automotive and manufacturing, retail, energy and utilities, packaged goods, and public sector organisations. Headquartered in Redwood Shores, California, Saba has offices on five continents. For more information, please visit http://www.saba.com.