The NOSE

Desire2Learn Gaining Momentum

It was only a year ago when a stunned and shaken John Baker, President and CEO of Desire2Learn, announced at the Desire2Learn Conference 2006 in Guelph, Ontario that his small company had been sued by Blackboard for patent infringement. Blackboard had successfully patented a trivial concept with broad applicability and was now bringing the hammer down on its competitors.

A maelstrom of controversy quickly ensued in the higher education community, culminating in a strong public letter by the Educause Board to Michael Chasen, Blackboard CEO. The harsh letter expressed "deep concern" about Blackboard's patent action, challenged the basis of the intellectual property claim, and urged the company to place the patent in the public domain and also to withdraw the infringement claim against Desire2Learn.

A year later the patent controversy in the higher education community has largely subsided. After the "open source community" led by the Sakai Project extracted a concession --- in the form of a pledge by Blackboard not to assert its patents against open source software and home-grown course management systems- -- the higher education community and Educause withdrew from the fray, content apparently that its interests had been protected. (The Ex Parte patent re-examination filed by the Software Freedom Law Center was a quick hit- and-run affair. It has been of no use to Desire2Learn (it probably hurt their cause) and it certainly doesn't address any of the thorny issues surrounding educational patents.)

The upshot: Desire2Learn has stood alone to fight the good fight against Blackboard, which in comparison is a very big fish with a market cap of 1.25Billion and enjoys a de facto monopoly in the course management market in higher education.   

A year later Desire2Learn has not only recovered from the body blow by Blackboard but managed to gain considerable momentum. This year at the Desire2Learn 2007 conference John Baker looked remarkably upbeat and ebullient. The company is on a roll: new customers are coming on board, the company retains the hearts and minds of its existing customer base (no small feat in this market space), has successfully released a major upgrade in version 8.x, added major modules (e.g. competencies and rubrics), and begun to lay out plans for a technology architecture that promises to advance the platform to the next level.

Baker and his leadership team has also managed to keep their eye on fundamentals. The company has been on a growth fast-track (recipient of the Deloitte Technology Fast 50 Award in Canada), showing a 2,117% increase in revenue over a five-year period. Faced with the challenge of of having to evolve a company culture into a more disciplined service delivery organization, Baker's most impressive accomplishment during this change has been to retain the innovative energy of the original leadership team while adding seasoned professionals with expertise in QA, product development, services delivery, and project management.

Overall Desire2Learn's growth strategy and focus on execution is going very well indeed. And in its epic battle with Blackboard the company has not only hung in there but gotten stronger.

(Disclaimer: The views on this site are mine and mine alone, not those of my employer.)

Desire2Learn Conference Fusion 07

This week I am at the Desire2Learn Fusion 07 conference in Duluth, MN. A lot to report but here is a picture of D2L President John Baker and a couple of my colleagues from Minnesota enjoying a train ride near Lake Superior.

Identity 2.0 Gaining Momentum

One of my prinicipal take aways from the Burton Catalyst Conference: Identity 2.0 ("user-centric identity") is shining considerably brighter these days in the identity management firmament. While not a supernova event like Apple's rollout of the iPhone, we can expect to see more exciting developments. 

The maturation of Microsoft's CardSpace, the user-centric interop demonstration at Catalyst, and new developments around OpenID all presage a bright future for the user-centric approach advocated by identity gurus Dick Hardt (CEO, Sxip) and Kim Cameron (Microsoft's Identity Architect).

• What is Identity 2.0? You can't do better than start with Dick Hardt's entertaining keynote ("Identity 2.0") at Oscon 2005. Want more Dick? Try, "Who's the Dick on my Site."
  
• What are Identity 2.0 principles? Wade into Kim Cameron's influential paper "The Laws of Identity". And then "The Identity Metasystem", which introduces an inter-operable architecture based on the laws of identity.