For the past 10½ years Grant Ricketts served as Vice President Business Development and Founding Member at Saba and was part of the start-up management team that founded the company in 1997. The company had a successful IPO in April 2000 and today employees over 500 people serving over 1,200 customers worldwide. Some credit him with coining the term, ‘LMS’ though he insists it first appeared in an article by Brandon Hall.

He played several roles at Saba, spearheading the market introduction of Saba to establish the company as the leader in the enterprise learning and later, introducing the discipline of Learning Governance as a strategic discipline for the industry. He co-authored the industry’s first white paper on the subject, “Governing the Learning Organization in an Era of Strategic Human Capital Management,” and speaks frequently on the topic at several industry conferences, customer meetings and webinar events.

He managed strategic alliances with global partners such as IBM and Deloitte Consulting and created the Content Alliance program – which today serves over 230 content and tools providers from 30 different countries worldwide. He’s also been the host of the popular thought leadership webinar series InsideContent! and HCLive! This ‘ecosystem’ of partnerships is another contributing factor to collecting best practices for defining different industry solutions across the globe.

Mr. Ricketts has spoken at numerous conferences including OnLine Learning (1999, 2000 and 2001), Information Technology Training Association (ITTA, 1999, 2000), Instructional Systems Association (ISA, 2000, 2002), TechLearn (1998 – 2004), Learning 2006 and 2007, Training2001, Educa Berlin (Germany, 1999), SALT 2008, and Forum de Tecnologia (Sao Paulo, Brazil, 2000), and various seminars and workshops in Mexico and Brazil in 2005. He authored another article on governance entitled, “Learning Governance: The Next Learning Gap,” published in CLO Magazine in January 2005.

Before joining Saba, Mr. Ricketts spent several years with Sybase where he created the company’s first channels business plan and in 1995 started the Internet Products Group, whose web.sql product (1995) was the first commercial solution for dynamic linking of web pages with databases. He later led market development for the Internet and New Media Division at Oracle creating one of the company’s early Internet business plans to integrate the Network Computing Architecture (NCA) across several different product divisions.

He started his career in advertising with Foote, Cone & Belding and D’Arcy MacManus Masius in San Francisco. This background influenced his conference and webinar sessions on ‘Marketing the Learning Organization’ – a perennial favorite for learning practitioners.

Mr. Ricketts earned his MBA from the University of California, Berkeley, as well as a B.A. in Economics with honors from U.C. Berkeley.