Houston, TX-based Simplilearn has acquired Santa Cruz, CA-based Market Motive for $10 million.
“There are more than 1.3 million unfilled full-time positions for IT and developers, but 22 million people in the US who are underemployed,” explains Michael Stebbins, CEO and co-founder of Market Motive, which offers online courses in digital marketing. With its acquisition by workforce course provider Simplilearn, Stebbins hopes to shrink that gap.
Simplilearn offers over 250 online courses to business professionals in areas including Social Media Marketing and Digital Advertising Web Analytics. Prashant Parmar, Simplilearn’s Director of US Operations, sees the addition of Market Motive’s digital marketing courses as a “perfect fit.” So far more than 400,000 professionals in 100 countries have enrolled in Simplilearn courses, and have seen $4 billion worth of pay raises, according to a press release. “Simplilearn’s scaling and delivery systems blew our minds,” Stebbins tells EdSurge.
MarketMotive will continue to offer its existing courses, which cover subjects like SEO and web analytics, to the larger audience of Simplilearn students. To date, Market Motive has trained “just shy of 30,000 marketers,” according to Stebbins.
With the acquisition, the Simplilearn hopes to offer more courses in digital marketing and big data, and develop more certifications specific to a student’s university or company. Currently, certifications are either provided by outside organizations, like a certification from Project Management Institute for the project management course, or by Simplilearn. “By the end of 2015, we hope to partner with lots of corporate entitlement systems to help their teams gain skills,” says Stebbins.
