eCollege, a publicly traded company that was founded in 1996 and employs 260 people, can be considered a "top commercial" CMS provider. "On a revenue basis we are about the same size in e-learning as Blackboard," says Thorne, who claims that a major portion of Blackboard’s total revenues are derived from a combination of its non e-learning business, such as Blackboard’s student debit card transaction processing services and products, and its non higher-education business, such as Blackboard’s software licensing agreements with publishing and information companies.

At eCollege, an estimated $20 million in 2001 revenues were derived strictly from its wide and varied list of distance education services provided to K-12 and higher education clients, Thorne says.

He adds that although eCollege has a considerably smaller number of clients (currently at 243) than Blackboard and WebCT (each with more than 2,000 customers), the business relationships eCollege has with its clients are, for the most part, relatively large revenue generators. "We have very large relationships with a smaller set of schools," says Thorne. "Ours is a bigger service model. Our average client last year did about $70,000 in revenue." Blackboard and WebCT, on the other hand, according to the recent Chronicle article, license their software to small institutions for about $5,000 to $7,500 per year and to larger institutions for about $30,000 to $50,000 per year.

"We (eCollege) were born in the distance education world, and we have always been a full-service application service provider (ASP)," says Thorne. "We have always hosted all of our customers; we have always built portals for our clients so students can apply, get admitted, get enrolled, pay tuition and get their grades. We have always had courseware; and we have always helped our schools build their courses. We have always provided training to faculty in terms of how to teach online. We also provide help-desk services to most of our clients."

eCollege recently rolled out what it calls "eCollege AU," which stands for "About You" - a series of new product enhancements, beginning with two rolled out in December - one related to providing unprecedented levels of accessibility for the disabled, which eCollege claims to exceed Section 508 standards, and another called "CourseFlex Navigation," which was designed to emulate the course structure of other CMS platforms and enable easy transfer of courses to the eCollege platform.

More new features are slated to be launched during first quarter of 2002. "What the industry does not understand is that from the feature perspective (meaning courseware functionality), we are and always have been way ahead," says Thorne. "There is going to be a lot of action out of us next year (2002); we have drawn up lots of great plans."

eCollege