Nov. 4, 2009 (Business Wire) -- Saba (NASDAQ:SABA), the premier people management software and services provider, concluded People 2009 – Saba Global Summit, the most acclaimed annual user conference in Saba's history. Held late last month in San Francisco, Saba Summit brought together over 500 attendees from around the world to learn about the latest innovations to help people-driven organizations succeed in today’s uncertain economic times.

People 2009 featured illuminating presentations from industry executives and researchers including: Bobby Yazdani, chairman and CEO, Saba; Amar Dhaliwal, senior vice president, product operations group, Saba; Sundar Nagarathnam, vice president of NetApp University, NetApp; Josh Bersin, president of Bersin & Associates; Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor of organizational behavior at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University; and Jason Averbook, chief executive officer, Knowledge Infusion.

In his opening day presentation, “Business Next: People-Driven Strategies for Success”, Yazdani outlined how Saba is unifying, engaging, mobilizing, and fostering collaboration to achieve success both top down and bottom up, and how organizations need to all embrace the transition to a people-driven knowledge economy that depends on great ideas and innovations that are allowed to flourish, especially in these uncertain times. Dhaliwal demonstrated how Saba is at the forefront of thinking about unified people management, collaboration, and social media with an array of new products and innovations that go in and beyond processes to the richer value of information.

On the second day of the conference Nagarathnam and Bersin highlighted the importance of linking employee performance with business performance, and the criticality of cultivating and tapping into experts and high potentials, a concept referred to as "talent density." Nagarathnam has transformed NetApp University into a critical business driver using business intelligence to create performance dashboards and operational metrics aligned by business stakeholder roles demonstrating the business value of a unified people platform. Bersin spoke about the need for transparency into an organization's talent, the role of informal learning, collaboration, and social networking, and the importance of metrics.

Pfeffer and Averbook brought tremendous energy and real world examples to the final day of the event by illustrating how investing in people separates winners from losers, especially in down economies. Companies with engaged employees achieve 19 percent higher operating profits, yet over 20 percent of employees say they are disengaged, and 50 percent say they will change jobs when the recession ultimately ends.