At the recent ITEXPO (News - Alert) West 2011 in Austin, TX, TMC CEO Rich Tehrani had the opportunity to speak to Saba about the company's Saba People Cloud. Specifically, Saba is interested in offering customers a social learning experience and extending it to the mobile environment.

David Koehn, director of product strategy for Saba (News - Alert), spoke about social learning as a key transformative experience for the enterprise. According to Koehn, the Saba People Cloud offers "a transformative workplace environment where all of our customers and buyers can come to us for a turnkey solution in the cloud for the key people processes within their organization such as performance, learning and social networking."

Koehn said that while many companies understand how to administer learning, the corporate climate is quickly moving from a knowledge economy to a networked economy. The challenge of social learning is to connect people at the point of need with advisors, mentors, discussions, forums or whatever else they need to learn a specific thing. And that connection must be done in real time, regardless of location and device on which they will access the information, in order for the point of need to be executed upon.

Saba believes that industries across the board may benefit from their social learning environment, and their customer base comprises a wide range of markets. Koehn said people doing task on oil rigs can benefit within the field services segment, while direct and indirect sales channel companies like NetApp have discovered that using social learning technologies can transform the sales experience for indirect channels at increasing pipeline by 70 percent.

Brinker International, owner of the Chili's, Maggiano's and Macaroni Grill restaurant chains, is using Saba to establish a system so that waitstaff may perform their jobs more efficiently in order to transform the entire organization.

Tehrani inquired about the feasibility of using social learning solutions to address the issue of unemployment by helping skilled workers to acquire and keep their jobs through proper on-the-job training.

"One of the beauties of social learning is that it fits right into this process of social onboarding," said Koehn. He said that when a new employee starts a job, they must fill out the requisite paperwork and go through a number of standard procedures before beginning work. "We help connect that new person in the organization to experienced people who can mentor them not only on the formal learning in terms of how to complete a course, but how to execute their job better because they've been in that role."

Saba is offering a free 30-day trial of Saba People Cloud to help enterprises experience the power of the transformative workplace through social learning.

The company also recently spoke to TMC (News - Alert) about the power of enterprise social networking solutions as the next generation of unified communications.

Headquartered in Redwood Shores, CA (News - Alert), Saba has offices throughout the world. The company has customers in a number of sectors including financial services, life sciences and healthcare, high tech, automotive and manufacturing, retail, energy and utilities, packaged goods and public sector organizations. Their customers include 51 percent of the Fortune 100.