than just cost; a wider range of titles for your money.


There are also successful niche players, focusing on specific subject matter or markets where they have specialist expertise and relationships that create barriers to entry.


Atlas, for example, has a very strong position in oil and gas. You can probably think of other examples in healthcare, pharma or insurance. This specialism route can also be advantageous in a bespoke business, and is one of the few routes to successfully integrating bespoke and OTS services in the same company.


Differentiation through quality of product or service is difficult in a market where ideas can be swiftly copied. But the alternative for niche companies - to sell on price - is generally economic suicide. Prices are inevitably driven down to marginal cost, quality suffers and the bottom feeders often drive out companies with higher standards before going bust too.


Floating away


A word of caution about OTS companies pursuing a public listing. Although it can provide funds for internal investment and/or growth by acquisition, it is costly and time consuming and puts the company into the spotlight in bad times as well as good.


The pressure to grow shareholder value can lead to risky acquisitions. Buying companies requires a very different skill set from growing an e-learning company organically.


ILX floated on AIM in 2000, originally as Time2Learn, then Intellexis then ILX. Over that time a robust underlying business has been subject to volatile financial results as a result of its acquisition strategy.


Most notably the purchase of a company called CTG directly led to record profits of almost £4m between 2006 and 2008 and then losses of £12.5m in the following three years as the investment was written off and CTG closed. ILX,itself, has now been swallowed-up in a reverse takeover by Progility.


Crystal ball gazing


What is the future for OTS? I doubt there will ever be an Amazon of e-learning - unless it is Amazon - but there is reason for optimism.


The rise of mobile platforms and related trends towards performance support, short, focused learning at the point of need, is creating new opportunities and delivery models.


It remains to be seen if the current main players will be agile enough to take advantage or if they will be outmanoeuvered by more nimble start-ups, or even big corporates entering the market in the way Pearson, Google and others have done in education.


"...the future for O TS?


There’s reason for optimism"


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