According to www.adobe.com this is their summary of what Adobe Captivate really is:

Adobe® Captivate® 3 software enables anyone to rapidly create powerful and engaging simulations, scenario-based training, and robust quizzes without programming knowledge or multimedia skills.

That’s only a half-truth actually because Adobe Captivate is much much more. In my company we use Captivate to build entire E-learning courses from scratch. Basically we have adopted Captivate as the framework for our courses.