This week LTG (our parent company) announced the formal acceptance of their bid to acquire NetDimensions. Depending on who you are and what you know, this may or may not seem like a big deal, or even a potential threat.
I wanted to quickly, publicly, and officially alleviate any concerns you may have.
When LTG acquired us a little over a year ago, Mike and I made clear that it was crucial to us that Rustici Software be allowed to serve its customers in exactly the way it always has… agnostically.
We’ve never recommended amongst our LMS or content providing customers. We just wouldn’t do it, and we won’t do it. And that’s still true today, with full knowledge of the NetDimensions acquisition.
A related story: LTG owns a content authoring platform, gomo learning, which does not use any Rustici products. At the same time, we have provided our SCORM Driver product (which also supports xAPI/cmi5) to Articulate, Adobe, and Dominknow- competitors of gomo.
Early in the integration process, we were asked by gomo folks if we could integrate gomo directly into SCORM Cloud as a way to introduce their product to our many users of SCORM Cloud. Doing so almost certainly would have brought some prospects to gomo and increased the revenue of the group as a whole, and could have potentially brought Rustici some referral revenue as well.
We refused. And LTG supported that choice.
(gomo has also been given the freedom not to acquire our software, too, for what it’s worth because they already had a reasonable solution in place.)
This autonomy is crucial to our ability to serve so many of the vendors in the industry, many of whom compete with each other.
If some of the folks at NetDimensions ask my opinion about how and whether they should adopt xAPI, I will certainly offer it, just as I would for any other LMS vendor who calls upon me. If those same people ask me to inform them about another LMS vendor’s plans in this regard, I merely point them to publicly available information.
More directly: we will offer our services and products to NetD, and they will have the ability to procure them, just like we would with any other LMS provider.
So, congratulations to LTG and NetD both. It’s an exciting combination for parts of the group, and business as usual for Rustici Software.
