Saba Software: Heavy Lifting

Saba Enterprise Learning Suite includes class and resource scheduling, skills tracking, collaboration features, and tools for content authoring and publishing. Saba Enterprise Performance Suite lets managers and employees set and evaluate development goals.

Saba Software could teach a stadium full of people a thing or two: It receives the strongest acclaim for its system’s ability to handle tens of thousands of users. But like any other enterprise software, customers say, there’s a fair amount of complexity in deploying and using it.

“Saba is very comprehensive. It’s not for the timid,” says Art DiMartile, senior information-technology manager in Procter & Gamble’s human-capital management systems group. “If all you want to do is classroom training, there’s a lot of extra stuff you don’t need.”

P&G picked Saba in 1999, because “there were few learning-management systems that were scalable to 100,000 users” and because the software provided a more complete set of features than competing products, DiMartile says. Since then, his group has customized the system to provide features Saba lacked, according to DiMartile, such as single sign-on; those features have been “expensive to maintain” through three upgrades. Still, he says, “We have no regrets. I still think in terms of all-around capability, they’re the best.”

Consulting firm Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu also selected Saba’s software, which it rolled out in 2000, because it could serve thousands of employees. Nick van Dam, Deloitte’s chief learning officer, says the firm considered learning-management options offered by its two enterprise-resource planning vendors, PeopleSoft and SAP, but decided to go with a standalone system. “In our situation, it was more cost-effective to have Saba as the solution rather than using an ERP system,” van Dam says.

Other customers have found Saba’s offering a mixed bag. “What worked, worked extremely well. What didn’t work took them forever to fix,” says Dick Laforge, director of customer education at Xilinx, a manufacturer of programmable chips that uses a hosted version of Saba’s system to provide 10,000 customers, partners and employees access to product training. For example, he says, Saba took two years to incorporate the ability to let participants evaluate classes into its system.

Malcolm Hobbs, Saba’s vice president of marketing, says the process of prioritizing which features to develop based on customer requests is a delicate balance: “As you get more customers, making product choices is one of the challenges.”