Articulate: #1 Market Share Among Privately-Held Companies

We’ve always known our market position was strong and now it’s official: We have the #1 market share for rapid elearning tools among privately-held elearning companies, according to research published by The eLearning Guild in its new Guild Research 360 Report on e-Learning Authoring and Development Tools.

With 31.45% of the rapid e-learning development tools market, we’re #3 overall on the list, behind only Microsoft (with PowerPoint and its nearly half a billion worldwide users) and Adobe (with Captivate, which many of our customers also use to complement their Articulate projects) — two of the largest software companies in the world.

Our market share for rapid e-learning development tools is nearly double that of the next closest competitor and five times or more greater than a number of publicly-held companies.

Close observers may have noticed the new numbers we recently added to our clients page: “More than 12,000 organizations in 115 countries are using Articulate’s intuitive technologies to create powerful e-learning.”

Articulate Tools Earn Top Satisfaction Scores

In addition to this exciting news about our market share, our tools have again earned top honors in the same Guild Authoring and Development Tools report.

As noted in our press release about the research:

In the rapid e-learning development tools category, Articulate Rapid E-Learning Studio:

• Ranked #1 in PowerPoint to Flash conversion, auto-creation of simple navigation, audio recording and editing, and the ability to create simple basic practice and assessment exercises.
• Ranked #2 in ease of use — second only to Microsoft PowerPoint. Since Articulate Presenter converts PowerPoint to Flash and installs within PowerPoint, Articulate users create courses using PowerPoint and Presenter — the top two ease-of-use tools.

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In the courseware authoring tools category, Articulate Rapid E-Learning Studio ranked #1 in ease of use, time to proficiency, cost effectiveness, WYSIWYG editing, and the ability to import/convert PowerPoint. The report also revealed that Articulate enjoys a significantly higher ease-of-use rating than the next highest-rated products.

Last year we were awarded platinum and gold awards from the eLearning Guild based on responses to its Immersive Learning Simulations survey. The Guild decided not to give awards for the research this year, but had they done so, we’d have even more medals for our trophy case.

Guild Interview with Articulate President & CEO Adam Schwartz

All that and this information-packed, 295-page report also contains the transcript of an interview between Steve Wexler, Director of Guild Research, and our president & CEO, Adam Schwartz. Below are some highlights from that interview.

First, Adam talks about what you can expect from our next generation of products:

When you look at our next generation of authoring tools, we’re focusing on what we’re calling “no compromises,” and really combining the best of both worlds — the speed and ease of rapid tools with the power and flexibility of programming tools. You see a lot of rapid authoring tools today that are primarily form-based. And forms and templates are really cool for people getting started. They’re great because they allow someone to very quickly, without a whole lot of design skills or programming skills, create e-Learning content. The problem, though, with form-based tools is that you eventually hit a ceiling. At some point your skills start to become greater than the capabilities of the tool itself. And at that point the form, which was an enabler previously, then becomes more of a limitation. The kinds of tools that we’re working on today overcome this limitation, and instead combine the best of both worlds. It’s about allowing a very rapid form or template-based approach, but, if you want to flip it, you can actually get to a total freeform approach that leverages what you’ve done in the form.

Steve then asked Adam about his thoughts on competitor Captivate ranking high in the tools usage report:

I couldn’t be more thrilled that Captivate is at the top of the list, and I’ll tell you why. First of all, Captivate is a really good tool. We recommend that tool quite often. Many of our customers use Captivate as a way of creating software simulations that they then insert into our tools, and we actually optimized our tools to support Captivate.

But more exciting is the fact that the former Captivate engineering team is now at Articulate. So, the team that innovated RoboDemo and Captivate, all the way up through Captivate 2, is no longer at Adobe and is now at Articulate.

Guild members can read the rest of the interview and more in the 360 Report on e-Learning Authoring and Development Tools.

What does all this mean to you? You can rest assured that when you’re working with Articulate tools, you’re working with the best rapid elearning software on the market — and that you’re going to love even more what’s coming next.