Holidays are over and another school year is upon us as students in Europe and the US headed back to school in August. Those in the UK and France have a few more weeks of summer holidays before they too will be back in their classrooms and lecture halls. I hope everyone has had a good break.
I’ve had a busy and productive summer, enjoying a few lazy days in southern Europe with family and friends, and meeting many great people – customers, our financial advisors and our new Chief Revenue Officer, Ryan Vasquez. He joined us the first week of August and is based in Austin, Texas.
As CRO, Ryan will work closely with me and the other members of the executive team to develop comprehensive strategies for top line growth and talent development. He will lead our global efforts to grow both our customer base and customer satisfaction, with a focus on positioning itslearning as the leading LMS provider for educational institutions in the US.
Ryan has extensive background in Enterprise SaaS Sales, beginning his career at ADP, before moving to Oracle and, most recently, Social Solutions where he was Senior Vice-President of Sales. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Biology from the University of Texas at Austin, and enjoys scuba diving and spending time with his wife, two children, and the family’s two dogs.
“I chose itslearning because I wanted to be part of an amazing team, in a company that provides software that makes an impact in the community and is a leader in its industry.”
~ Ryan Vasquez
In other developments, we completed the staggered rollout of the new course cards Home page to all our customers this August. The Home page is the key feature in our Back to School 2019 enhancements designed to help teachers click less, teach more, and change lives. Aiding teachers with organizational tools and better ways to communicate and collaborate is a big part of not just our Back to School campaign, but also our ongoing efforts to make itslearning the LMS of choice for teachers and students everywhere.
The best LMS is the one that teachers actually use, and we have always focused on building itslearning for teachers and how they want to teach. Students can only succeed with itslearning if teachers do. So, we must first connect with teachers if we’re going to make a difference in classrooms around the world. It’s truly heartening when teachers tell us that they love our learning platform and its many integrations (I have shared some of their tweets before) and the positive impact it has on the lives of their students.
This summer also saw Fronter users complete their transition to Fronter 19, a strong, fully-featured platform that combines digital tools and content in a seamless way. Fronter 19 gives them similar full-scale LMS functionalities to what itslearning users have had. The team behind this project has done an amazing job and we need to keep up this momentum to ensure the highest level of customer satisfaction for Fronter users.
Our product team has been hard at work all summer and is gearing up to present a new product roadmap, which you will get to see soon on our Product Roadmap page.
Autumn is promising to be just as exciting – we’re expecting more new users and there’s quite a bit of company social activity planned, because we know what all work and no play does. I’m really looking forward to the new challenges and I hope you are, too.
Welcome back!
Arne Bergby
CEO, itslearning
