Introducing the application at an event in London on Wednesday, e2train business development director Martin Belton said the new elements were driven by customer and market feedback. Better reporting would help learning and development teams align learning to corporate objectives, while the configurable web interface would help learners overcome information overload, he explained.

"Customers want better analytics - that's the top demand, followed by reporting and a desire to leverage informal learning opportunities," Belton said. "It's only in the past 6-12 months that customers have said to us that they want to do something with informal learning - it's been so rapid we've had to get to grips with it."

Research from May's Bersin survey of corporate training attitudes found that senior managers were suspicious of informal learning, because their people were already spending so much time multitasking and browsing on Google and Twitter - so they were reluctant to see them do more, Belton said. More importantly for corporate training professionals was the need to create a comprehensive learning environment that could incorporate informal elements.

The Kallidus 8 learner's home page is a very attractive interface, and one that can quickly be configured by the system administrator to include mandatory elements, but also leaving space on screen for users to add their own widgets and feeds from sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Kallidus 8 includes the ability to give content Google-style star ratings. The application looks and feels great - but it may be overambitious to present these interface enhancements as the answer to coping with informal learning and information overload.

The reporting improvements are more significant from the performance management perspective. Leading a quick tour of the on-screen report generator, e2train's Rob Caul showed how easy it was to pick up and report on data fields within Kallidus, and external data sources. The company has already put links in place to SAP financial and operational systems, so that sales data, for example, can be brought in and used to analyse the effectiveness of training programs.

The on-screen reports make it possible to drill down into data. Continuing with the sales data demonstration, the sales figures for stores in Birmingham include summaries for each of the employees, so those who have done training on a particular product line could be assessed by their subsequent sales.

"This could be something line managers would be interested in - and there's no need for programming skills, it's all drag and drop," Caul said. "We're trying to drive performance with the learning. We don't just want to measure their performance on the learning, but has it had any impact on the sales side?"

Kadillus 8 prides itself on being a mid-market solution for the corporate training sector, but elearnity analyst David Wilson gave the developer credit for reading how the market was moving.

"Reporting capabilities are becoming a major differentiator between LMS products in the corporate sphere. If e2train get that right, this will help them move up the value chain," Wilson said.