Saba Collaboration Suite infuses real-time collaboration and enterprise business networking capabilities into learning and performance management people processes. Saba enables enterprises to mobilize and engage their people to drive new strategies, align and connect people to accelerate the flow of business, and cultivate and ignite people knowhow. Saba Collaboration Suite combines Saba Live, a new enterprise business networking offering, and Saba Centra, an enterprise-class web conferencing solution.

Saba Live will integrate Saba's rich person profile, and will include embedded competency-driven expertise, Twitter-like performance feedback, blended learning, and workplace analytics.

Saba Collaboration Suite will:
Bring to market an integrated solution that combines enterprise-class web conferencing and real-time communication with cutting-edge business networking capabilities to enrich learning and performance business processes.
Power real-time communication with presence, instant messaging, video-enabled channels, VoIP-enabled online meetings, and web conferences.
Enable organizations to identify, engage, and retain top people as well as quickly onboard new hires, thereby multiplying people's productivity to outperform the competition.
Cultivate the knowhow needed in today's global, multi-generational workforce by deploying a blended enterprise training and learning strategy that incorporates formal and informal learning and knowledge transfer.
Feature Saba Dynamic Network Analysis (DNA), a workplace analytics platform for visualizing connections between people and resources to provide strategic organizational insight.

Saba Live:
Will enable a dynamic and engaged workforce, where employees, partners, and customers across an enterprise ecosystem can continuously connect and collaborate through Web 2.0 tools such as discussion forums, activity feeds, wiki, blogs, a Facebook-like wall, micro-blogs, resource lists, and social bookmarks.

Is designed to include features such as:

• Unified People Profiles -- to provide a complete view of continuously updated competencies, skills, interests, and talent - at the individual, team, and organizational level.
• Expertise Locator -- to identify organizational knowledge through powerful search.
• Saba Live Pages -- to simplify the creation of rich web pages, masking the complexity found in typical wiki solutions.
• Saba Live Ideas -- to support crowd-sourcing innovation in the organization with social voting, rating, and tagging.
• Saba Live Impressions -- to enable Twitter-like performance feedback by co-workers, complementing the formal, periodic performance review process with continuous, informal input.
• Saba Live Groups -- to create cross-functional communities of practice that can collaborate to get work done.
• Unified View of Content -- to allow people to share files, author Saba Live Pages, contribute Internet content, share videos, record web conferences, and federate content from repositories like Microsoft SharePoint. All content can be rated and shared, resulting in an always up-to-date knowledge base that averts stale intranet content.
• Saba Live Conferences -- to support virtual conferences powered by Saba Centra Web Conferencing technology; spontaneous, easy setup and recording; and real-time communication.
• Saba Live Channels -- to bring YouTube-like ease of video sharing to the enterprise by organizing Saba Centra recordings and videos, enabling formal and social learning within the organization.

Supporting Comments

"With more than 35,000 restaurants in over 110 countries and territories, Yum! Brands is a dispersed global business with a centralized dedication to customers and people," said Mary Woolf, director of learning technologies at Yum! Brands. "Saba Learning and Saba Centra are an important part of our people development strategy and will fundamentally change the way we do business. Our employees, the environment, and the learning process itself are becoming more social, and Saba is right there to meet the needs of our people-focused, world-class organization."

"Saba demonstrates vision and leadership by combining Web 2.0 communications tools, real-time communications and enterprise social networking," said Zeus Kerravala, senior vice president, enterprise research, Yankee Group. "The combination of a collaboration platform with learning and HR systems is a fundamental transformation needed in this industry."

"At the Hitachi Data Systems Academy, we enable learning for our employees, partners and customers," said Nick Howe, vice president, Hitachi Data Systems. "The Saba Learning platform has been used as a core technology for our enterprise-wide mission critical learning initiatives for the past six years. The Saba Learning platform's enterprise social networking is an innovative technology that will enable continuous learning and employee development necessary for today's agile organization."

"Collaboration solutions tend to fall into one of two camps, relying on real-time communication via voice, video, and chat or focusing on team-building with persistent, text-oriented collaboration spaces," said Brad Shimmin, principal analyst, collaboration platforms at Current Analysis. "Building on its Web conferencing and training experience, Saba is seeking to bridge these two worlds with a profile-centric, search-capable social networking platform tuned toward key use cases such as expertise location, social learning, and content sharing."

"Until today, solutions for social networking have had limited success in enterprise-wide deployments due to inherently weak security models and a lack of true integration with existing business processes," said Jim Lundy, VP and GM of Collaboration, Saba. "Saba Collaboration Suite uniquely integrates with the leading Saba Learning Suite and Saba Performance Suite to enable global organizations to extend and transform their existing enterprise training and HR business processes."