Sparking Interest: Southern Company Chooses Click2Learn.com

Southern Company hopes E-learning systems supplier Click2Learn.com Inc. will help turn its employees on to training. The $10 million dollar electricity supplier Thursday chose Ingenium, Click2Learn's learning-management system, to manage career training for over 26,000 employees nationwide.

Ingenium is a Web-based platform that tracks employees' online and off-line corporate training. It will serve as the base for Southern Company's "Learning Source" initiative, a program to manage training for Southern Company's 26,000 employees--everything from instructor-led and virtual-classroom courses to asynchronous, personalized E-learning courses.

Al Martin, Southern Company's director of employee learning, says Click2Learn's robust technology, complex functionality, and customer responsiveness set it apart from 11 other vendors bidding for the contract. "They had the functionality necessary for our needs," says Martin, noting that an E-commerce function was built-in, allowing employees to purchase courses with credit cards.

Southern Company has chosen a robust system "with personalization tools from the Intelliprep acquisition, as well as Click2Learn's strong engine and authoring tools," says Claire Schooley, senior analyst at Giga Information Group Inc.

Click2Learn will host the system remotely, in addition to providing customized and off-the-shelf courses for Southern Company's employees.