On December 1 2022 SAP sold Litmos LMS to Francisco Partners, a private equity company based in California.
Litmos was originally acquired by SAP as part of their acquisition of Callidus back in April 2010. Callidus was purchased for its CRM capabilities with the intention of integrating with Hybris, SAP’s cloud-based e-commerce platform solution for B2B and B2C enterprises. This allowed SAP to offer a stronger proposition in the overall £46 billion CRM market. Callidus had previously acquired Litmos in 2011, specifically for the purpose of generic sales training.
The inclusion of Litmos within SAP’s acquisition of Callidus caused some conflict of interest as SAP already had a market leading LMS within their product suite. This was a challenge in particular for the SAP SuccessFactors product strategy as the Litmos LMS didn’t fill any gap or meet a specific market need. It was regarded as a simple learning platform with a fantastic user interface that required little effort to set up. Unfortunately, it did have some weaknesses, if you can call them that, which Jigsaw found to be its restrictive functionality and limited features.
However, it was the perfect tool to deliver discrete learning content to a discrete learning audience, a point solution as a learning platform. Where it wasn’t so strong was in its ability to fulfil the role of a corporate learning infrastructure platform.
In 2021 Jigsaw Cloud was assigned and invited by SAP SuccessFactors to work with Litmos as a value-added reseller and service partner. The Litmos services available for customers to access via partners like Jigsaw was very restrictive as the product is quite simple with a strong ‘do it yourself’ sales proposition. The opportunity for us was only limited to customers who had no inclination or motivation to do it themselves, a bit like paying someone to assemble your IKEA furniture.
Our CEO, Paul Rae, comments: “What surprised me was that Litmos was more expensive than the SAP learning and only out classed it on aesthetics and rapid deployment.”
Paul goes on to explain, “I was also taken aback by the number of times customers of SAP Litmos reached out, asking if the system could fulfil incremental business requirements and on almost every occasion, the answer was always no.
It became apparent that Litmos was never going to be in a position to be anything other than an expensive luxury points learning platform for four point learning content. This does not compete with the overall value proposition of SAP Success Factors, which is a tier one, globally, enhanced functionally rich end to end, HXM infrastructure for corporations.
As a partner, we found Litmos to have great people and culture and their customers were very interesting, but ultimately, it was not an enhancement to SAP SuccessFactors.”
As a result of the Litmos sale by SAP, Jigsaw Cloud will no longer be offering Litmos LMS support or implementation to new customers as part of our suite of services.
