Privately held Asymetrix Learning Systems Inc, nee Asymetrix Corp, wants to sharpen its focus as a multimedia training company since the acquistion of learning software outfit Aimtech Corp in July. Next month it will announce a partnership with streaming video company RealNetworks. Asymetrix will ship RealNetworks’ servers and encoders with its next version of training software Instructor to make it easier to include streaming audio and video in training applications.In addition, it has introduced Librarian, a centralized management system for online learning applications to track the performance of the users; and ToolBook II version 6.0, software for creating learning applications for the Web.Asymetrix sees online training as an emerging market and cites a study from US industry watchers Omnitech Consulting that states that computer based training, commonly known as CBT, currently makes up 15% of all training, and will grow to 36% of the market by 2000.Training is one of the largest applications of multimedia technology so we are focusing all our efforts on that market, said David Burke, marketing manager. Bellevue, Washington based Asymetrix finds most of its business for multimedia training in the corporate, government and education markets. It remains committed to the high end Windows authoring system IconAuthor, which was originally Aimtech’s, because it is ideally suited to CBT. It has brought out two new versions of it, IconAuthor Net Edition 7.6 and IconAuthor 7.1 for Unix.Asymetrix sold off Aimtech’s Jamba, a Java authoring tool that adds interactivity to Web sites, to Interleaf Inc last month, but has retained the rights because it wants to use it in future versions of its authoring products. Asymetrix has a partnership with PictureTel for customers who want to add videoconferencing to CBT systems too.
