LRN Wins Five Awards Jointly With Its Clients Deloitte, Pepsi Co., and HP

LRN Corporation, the leader in ethics and compliance solutions that enable organizations to inspire principled performance, won five Brandon Hall Group awards for excellence in Human Capital Management. The 2023 Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Awards are given for work in Learning and Development, Talent Management, Leadership Development, Talent Acquisition, Human Resources, Sales Performance, Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, and Future of Work.

These wins, all in recognition of client work, acknowledge the collaborative nature of producing excellent training courses to meet the specific needs of an organization. LRN accepts these awards jointly with client partners Deloitte, PepsiCo, and HP.

Three Gold award wins:

• Supporting Mental Health at Work, with Deloitte
• PepsiCo's Lessons on Ethical Leadership
• Global Trade at HP: GTM Rapid Release Edition

One Silver award win:

• HP's Marketing Purchase-to-Pay Best Practices Training

One Bronze award win:

• Privileged User Training: The Wild, Wild Web, with HP

"I'm proud of the innovative and outstanding work the team has accomplished this past year," said Kevin Michielsen, LRN CEO. "Winning the five awards out of the five entries is a testament to the catered approach of our instructional design and delivery teams who consistently hit the mark for our clients."

Award entries were evaluated by a panel of veteran, independent senior industry experts, Brandon Hall Group analysts, and executives based upon these criteria: fit the need, design of the program, functionality, innovation, and overall measurable benefits.

"Excellence Awards winners are shown to be organizations that truly value their employees and invest in them through their human capital management programs. These HCM programs have been validated as best in class for your business value and the impact on the employees themselves," said Brandon Hall Group Chief Operating Officer Rachel Cooke, HCM Excellence Awards program leader.

Excellence Award winners are scheduled to be honored at Brandon Hall Group's HCM Excellence Conference, February 13 – February 15, 2024, at the Hilton West Palm Beach, Florida. Select winners also will serve as presenters in breakout sessions, sharing their leading practices during the conference. The wins were announced on Thursday, August 17. The winners are listed at https://excellenceawards.brandonhall.com/winners/

ABOUT LRN CORPORATION

LRN's mission and purpose is to inspire principled performance and help people around the world do the right thing. Since 1994, LRN has worked to propel organizations forward with the partnership, knowledge, and tools to build ethical culture. More than 2,800 companies and tens of millions of learners worldwide utilize LRN services and take LRN e-learning courses to help navigate complex regulatory environments and foster ethical, responsible, and inclusive cultures. In partnership with LRN, companies translate their values into concrete corporate practices and leadership behaviors that create sustainable competitive advantage. By acting upon shared values, companies and their people find the means to outbehave and outperform. Learn more at LRN.com and follow on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.

ABOUT BRANDON HALL GROUP

Brandon Hall Group is the only professional development company that offers data, research, insights, and certification to Learning and Talent executives and organizations. The best minds in Human Capital Management (HCM) choose Brandon Hall Group to help them create future-proof employee development plans for the new era.

For over 30 years, we have empowered, recognized, and certified excellence in organizations worldwide, influencing the development of over 10 million employees and executives. Our HCM Excellence Awards program was the first to recognize organizations for learning and talent and is the gold standard, known as the "Academy Awards of Human Capital Management."

The awards recognize the best organizations that have successfully developed and deployed programs, strategies, modalities, processes, systems, and tools that have achieved measurable results. We are honored to receive applications from organizations worldwide ranging from small, medium, large, and global enterprises to government, not-for-profits, and associations.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20230821645354/en/

This year, the VMware Explore 2023 world tour kicked off in Las Vegas, with regional conferences planned for Barcelona, Singapore, Sao Paulo and Tokyo later this fall. There were a handful of announcements that I found compelling at the U.S. event, and I would like to share my insights. In particular, I believe that VMware can Boost in some areas to compete for a greater share of wallet, especially with mid-market companies—so let’s dive in.

Networking announcements

VMware NSX is the company’s cloud networking software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution; it integrates security to enable consistent policy, operations and automation across multi-cloud environments. At VMware Explore, the company announced its newest cloud-managed service offering—NSX+.

As the name implies, NSX+ provides incremental enhancements, including support for global policy management, improving network and application visibility and providing consistent access control through a single click. From a security standpoint, NSX+ integrates VMware’s network detection response (NDR) and Carbon Black endpoint security capabilities into a single service. This has the potential to ease management and harden security by employing zero-trust principles across hybrid and multi-cloud instances. The convergence of networking and security is not new, but what I like about NSX+ is its ability to operate across AWS, Microsoft Azure and other public cloud platforms, simplifying the journey for both network and security operations staff.

Also worth noting is the company’s introduction of NSX+ virtual private clouds (VPCs) to facilitate the complete isolation of networking, security and adjacent services. This enhancement is designed to prevent impact to other tenants while enabling developer and application teams to select optimal cloud resources based on application requirements. I like VPCs' flexibility and the potential to accelerate developer innovation and provide improved application performance and end-user experiences.

Finally, VMware announced the initial availability of its VMware Private Mobile Network Service, a managed private cellular connectivity service for enterprises. VMware will provide the orchestration layer and private converged 4G and 5G core to facilitate overall management and integration into existing IT environments, both on-premises and in the cloud. The company is wisely partnering with Federated Wireless as one of its initial launch partners to build and operate the requisite 4G and 5G on-premises radio access network infrastructure, which spans Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) and privately licensed spectrum. Federated Wireless continues to demonstrate a solid track record in private networking and should help accelerate the new service’s adoption.

It’s good to see that VMware has entered the private networking space, but I wonder if the company is late to the game. Cisco, Cradlepoint and Nokia each have very mature private networking offerings and a considerable lead in market adoption. Consequently, VMware must make a solid case to vie for market share.

Security announcements

VMware’s Ransomware Recovery as-a-service solution was launched last year. Fundamentally, it facilitates the automation of workflows that isolate recovery environments in the cloud to prevent reinfection. This year at VMware Explore, the company announced enhancements that expand protection and accelerate recovery. New support for concurrent multi-virtual machine (VM) recovery operations aims to Boost the overall efficiency of the solution. Production VMs can also run in the cloud during forensics analysis before production workflows return on-premises. It's all very compelling, but seems complex compared to startup Airgap Networks, which offers a seemingly more straightforward Ransomware Kill Switch that is cloud-managed and does not require agents on endpoints.

Extended detection and response (XDR) is a hot category in cybersecurity right now, and at VMware Explore, the company announced advancements in its XDR offering through Carbon Black. At a high level, the product’s new extensibility applies to cloud-native application security, providing visibility and control within modern application environments leveraging containers and microservice architectures. The dynamic nature of these environments and the resulting blind spots make them ripe for infiltration by bad actors, so VMware is wise to address this area of concern, with expected general availability of its XDR offering within the next six months.

Wrapping up

From a networking and security standpoint, there was a lot to unpack at VMware Explore this year. The company's “North Star” vision (which is also its project code name for NSX+) provides a single platform that allows customers to manage multi-cloud infrastructure and networking and security operations through consistent policy constructs. That is a compelling value proposition, but the tradeoff comes in the form of VMware’s traditionally higher licensing costs, greater complexity and a steeper learning curve for IT operators and the greater demands on compute resources that VMs introduce. If VMware can address these challenges, it could expand its market presence, especially in smaller organizations that lack skill depth and employ lighter IT staffing models. From my perspective, that mid-market opportunity is ripe for the picking.

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