And close scrutiny is exactly what Craig Weiss applied to the offerings of some of the vendors at the leading edge of the learning industry – and the results were interesting.

As with any industry, there has been some confusion as to what exactly constitutes “next generation”. In the case of learning and development, the majority of the systems labelled as "next generation" simply aren’t. This might be down to any one (or a combination) of various factors. They might assume that their fledgling entry to the market instantly makes them next generation; they might believe that some of their features are sufficiently unique to fulfil the criteria; or they may just not understand what actually constitutes a next-generation system.

Craig's recent article on the topic broke the market down into three sectors: Leaders, Risers and Steady. All of the systems he identified in these sectors exhibited next-generation aspects to a greater - or lesser - degree.

The systems identified as Leaders are "NexGen to the max", with the Fuse Integrated Learning Platform comfortably sharing the number one spot. Describing the Leader systems as "the best of the best", Craig said, "Fuse has the best and most robust analytical data capture and visualisation I have seen in the industry." He was quick to laud Universal Analytics, Fuse’s built-in business intelligence tool, which is capable of capturing over 300 metrics of data.

Fuse also incorporates many of the functionality areas that Craig weighted the highest: curation, mentoring, video management, and metrics. Top of the list was machine learning, which Fuse uses to not only automatically transcribe videos, but to go the extra parsec and translate them into 35 languages.

The next generation of learning is knocking at the door, and Fuse’s Integrated Learning Platform is comfortably leading the way.

"Congratulations to the systems that have achieved NexGen status as Leaders," concludes Craig. "They have the right to say that they are NexGen – because they are."