Company Achieves Record Revenue Growth, Earns Recognition for Market Leadership, Technology Innovation and Superior Customer Service and Continues Global Expansion
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Arlington, Va. - 2 April, 2008 – Plateau Systemsa leading provider of talent management software, content and services, today announced that the company posted a revenue gain of 58% for its fiscal 2007, with recurring revenues comprising nearly half of the company’s total revenues. Over the past 12 months, increased demand for Plateau’s talent management solutions - driven largely by Plateau’s focus on delivering high-quality solutions that make customers successful - resulted in the addition of more than 1.3 million new users and numerous awards and industry recognition from customers, media and industry analysts. In early 2007, the company completed the acquisition and integration of Nuvosoft’s compensation functionality into the Plateau talent management suite. The company again outpaced competitors in delivering robust, highly-scalable talent management solutions with the releases of Plateau Schedule Builder and Plateau Question Editor (PQE) and continued to enhance end-user experience across Plateau’s performance management, learning and compensation processes and applications. During the year, the company continued to evolve its popular iContent offering, which remains the industry’s premier, one-stop solution for purchasing, managing and deploying content.
“Plateau’s commitment to establishing and maintaining open, collaborative relationships with our customers has been the key to our continued momentum and success. Over the past several years, Plateau has been fortunate to work closely with our customers to design, develop and deploy effective, high-quality talent management solutions that drive real business value,” said Paul Sparta, CEO of Plateau. “As organizations in our space seek to differentiate by bolting low value, ad-hoc ‘bell-and-whistle’ features and functionality that reflect the trend of the moment onto their products, Plateau remains focused on delivering thoughtful, scalable, fully integrated and interoperable solutions that advance strategic talent management, increase organizational efficiency and optimize business performance and results for our customers.”
Several leading financial publications and business organizations recognized Plateau’s financial performance throughout 2007, acknowledging the company’s growth, revenue, stability and viability. The Red Herring named Plateau a Red Herring 100 winner, recognizing the company as one of the most promising private North American technology companies. For the fifth consecutive year, Deloitte named Plateau to its Virginia Technology Fast 50 list, based the company’s percentage revenue growth over a five-year period.
Customers
Over the past year, more than 100 leading global organizations spanning a variety of industries including airlines, manufacturing, state and federal government, and technology have purchased and implemented Plateau’s talent management solutions. Market-leading customers including Canon U.S.A., Department of Homeland Security-Fire Academy, Emirates Group, Informatica, Malaysia Airlines, Pinnacle Airlines, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and W.L. Gore, as well as the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, which awarded Plateau contracts of more than $10 million last year, are using Plateau to support their strategic learning, performance, compensation, and career and succession management initiatives.
SaaS
Plateau’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) revenues, including subscription-hosting, grew 167% during 2007, with more than 60% of new customers choosing to deploy through Plateau’s SaaS offerings. The company’s momentum in this area was fueled by its success in deploying two of the industry’s largest enterprise talent management projects in a SaaS model. In the commercial sector, a single customer deployed Plateau’s talent management solutions in a fully-validated (for FDA compliance), hosted environment across more than 600,000 users in 20+ languages. In the public sector, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs selected Plateau’s SaaS and hosted talent management and iContent solutions to accelerate and streamline management and delivery of critical learning and development for more than 400,000 internal and external users.
Market Leadership
Plateau was widely recognized for its innovation, market leadership and unmatched dedication to customer satisfaction and success in 2007. In May the company received a “Positive” rating in the Gartner “MarketScope for Employee Performance Management Software, 2007.”¹ Bersin & Associates recognized Plateau’s leadership in customer satisfaction and market share, ranking the company the Overall Customer Satisfaction Leader for Global Enterprises in the Bersin & Associates 2007 LMS Customer Satisfaction Study. The firm further recognized Plateau as a Global Enterprise market share leader in the “Learning Management Systems 2008: Facts, Practical Analysis, Trends, and Vendor Profiles” report and awarded the company the highest possible ratings for Customer Satisfaction and Completeness of Vision in its Talent Management Suites: Market Realities, Implementation Experiences, and Vendor Profiles study. Plateau also earned three Gold Awards for its customer satisfaction and market share leadership from the eLearning Guild Member Choice Awards.
Closing out the fiscal year, Plateau scored a talent management “hat-trick” as the first and only talent management provider to be rated a leader in learning, performance, and integrated performance and compensation in Forrester Wave Reports. These reports included the February 2008 “Forrester Wave: Enterprise Learning Management Suites, Q1 2008” report and the August 2007 “Forrester Wave™: Integrated Performance and Compensation Solutions, Q3 2007.”
International Operations
During 2007, Plateau continued its global expansion, announcing the opening of an Asia-Pacific headquarters as well as several offices throughout EMEA and North America. The company significantly increased its revenue and doubled its customer base, adding several blue-chip customers including Rolls Royce, Siemens India, Swiss Re, Irish Life and Permanent, and Malaysia Airlines, who are using Plateau’s solutions to more closely align employee performance and productivity and broader organizational goals.
To support its international growth, Plateau more than doubled its international employee base and established partnerships with several leading resellers and consulting organizations including Universal Knowledge Solutions (UKS) and EDUTECH in the Middle East, LearnChamp, Ingenia and Crealogix in Europe, and Human Capital Solutions (HCS) and SeerPharma in Asia-Pacific.
In 2007, Plateau renewed its Safe Harbor certification and will continue to comply with The International Safe Harbor Privacy Principles set forth by the European Union (EU) as part of the Directive on Data Protection.
iContent
As the industry’s only multi-vendor internet solution for procuring, distributing, hosting, and managing custom content, Plateau’s iContent solution continued to gain traction and momentum with customers, partners and industry visionaries throughout 2007. In the past twelve months, more than 30 organizations including the U.S. Department of Labor, Canon U.S.A., Commerce Bank and Western Union, have purchased iContent.
Bersin & Associates' “Learning Management Systems 2008: Facts, Practical Analysis, Trends, and Vendor Profiles” report hails iContent as a ground-breaking solution for eliminating the content integration challenges and issues currently plaguing LMS customers. The report states that “the company deserves much credit as a pioneer in addressing the problems of learning content integration with its integrated iContent service offering.” iContent won numerous awards throughout 2007 including Top Training Product of Year from Human Resource Executive® magazine and Most Innovative New Product in E-Learning from E.Learning Age magazine. It also won the prestigious Platform Innovation award in the Bersin & Associates 2007 Learning Leaders Program.
Plateau expanded the functionality of iContent with increased content management and entitlement security capabilities, allowing administrators to view and manage all usage information for their organization's custom and commercial content from a single centralized location. The company also added Course Preview, which will allow users to view a snippet of course content before they purchase; the iContent Flex Card, which acts as a debit card for purchasing content via the iContent portal; and the Custom Course Upload, which allows iContent users to upload custom content developed for their specific organization.
Over the past year, iContent’s talent management content library continued to grow, with more than 30,000 custom developed and third-party assets now available through the offering. The company expanded its third-party offerings in key areas, including compliance, finance, healthcare, business and leadership, and technology training, with the addition of 14 new partners, including: CourseAvenue, Element K, getAbstract, KESDEE, LearnWright, Ninth House Quality Food Training, and WeComply.
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About Plateau
Plateau is a leading provider of talent management software, content and services designed to increase workforce productivity and drive business success. Plateau’s award-winning software is powering talent management initiatives across some of the world’s most successful organizations, including the American Red Cross, General Electric, the Internal Revenue Service, Capital One Services and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Industry analysts at Bersin & Associates, Forrester Research and other leading information and technology research and advisory firms continue to recognize Plateau’s leadership in delivering best-in-class functionality, technology and customer satisfaction. Plateau is headquartered in Arlington, Virginia and has offices across the United States, Europe and Asia Pacific. For more information, please visit www.Plateau.com.
¹ Gartner “MarketScope for Employee Performance Management Software, 2007” by Jim Holincheck. May 14, 2007
