Engage Prospects. Close More New Business Using Skytap
- Accelerate demo and POC cycles
- Provide instant access to rich, proof-of-concept environments
- Collaborate in realtime with prospects and channel partners
Screencast: Customer Demos In the Cloud
Today's high value clients seek personalized and compelling software demonstration experiences. Delivering an engaging experience can entirely determine which solution wins (or loses) the business. Sales engineering teams are often caught between the desire to create the ultimate demo / proof-of-concept and the reality of slow machines, complex set-up processes, and limited IT support. In addition, shipping multiple demo machines or traveling with them to customer locations is a costly and time consuming endeavor. This entire process distracts sales engineers from their core mission - showing what their software does best, and winning more business.
I purchased a Dell Mini 9, with 1 GB of RAM in it for personal use and travel with it. With Skytap, all I need is an internet connection for great, rocking demos of an Altiris solution that requires 7 virtual machines! Great service guys, now my bag is lighter when I travel.Jonathan Jesse, Practice Principle, ITS Delivers
Sales engineering managers in every software company ask the same question: How should my SE teams deliver compelling, customized demos and proof-of-concepts, but stay within existing budget, resource, and time constraints?
Skytap resolves the sales engineering management dilemma.
Skytap empowers sales teams with self service cloud-based demo and POC environments that provide frictionless customer collaboration. The net result: shorter sales cycles and more closed business.
Skytap's Customer Demo solution empowers sales organizations to take their existing demonstration labs and software to the cloud without requiring any application rewrites. Because Skytap is a cloud based solution sales engineers can create multiple custom demo configurations in the cloud in a few minutes using just a browser. These configurations can be cloned and published securely on the web so that you can easily manage multiple prospect evaluations simultaneously. You can interact and collaborate with your prospect as they engage your software. This personalized hands-on experience will wow your prospects and accelerate your sales cycle.
Sales engineering managers can centrally manage all the master or "gold" demo images, sales engineer access rights, and team usage and security policies. This top down view provides the cloud visibility and control you need to efficiently run your distributed sales engineering team.
Skytap's demonstration and proof-of-concept solution can be used for a broad range of scenarios, including:
- Self-service hosted demos
- Customized hosted proof-of-concepts (replace physical servers, etc)
- Rich self-service trials ("Try before you buy")
- New product release evaluations
- Customer user acceptance testing
- Product bake-offs for multiple platforms and databases
- Evaluation of ERP back-end integration
- Evaluation of other on premise system integration
Top 5 Features and Benefits at a Glance
| Feature | Key Benefit |
|---|---|
| Skytap Cloud Library | Accelerate Demo And POC Cycles
|
| Publish Custom Multi-machine Demos with Skytap Resource Links | Instant Access To Rich Demo And POC Environments
|
| Skytap Remote Access Console | Collaborate in Real-Time With Prospects And Channel Partners
|
| Skytap Groups, Projects and Roles | Manage Multiple Customers, Channels and Opportunities
|
| Advanced Networks and Skytap Hybrid Clouds | Demonstrate A Complete Solution With Differentiating Features
|
| And More... | Register for a complete demo and satisfy your curiosity. |
Accelerate Demo and POC Cycles with Skytap Cloud Library
Using the Skytap Cloud Library you can create a centralized repository of best practice "golden" demo images that include your applications with virtual machines, storage and networking settings just as you would in a physical data center. Sales engineers can use a browser to provision new demonstrations, customize each one and easily give customers access to instantly create a hosted POC environment. Because Skytap is a cloud based service, you can deploy these demos quickly and scale the number of demo / POC machines as readily as your customer opportunities scale. Once an opportunity is closed, unused demo environments can be deleted with the click of a mouse button or backed up as a template for future use.
Instant Access To Rich Demo and POC Environments with Skytap Resource Links
Using Skytap Remote Access Links, you can schedule hands-on demo sessions for your high value prospects and clients. Your clients can securely access the demo with just a browser and you can monitor, provide guidance and sales support as needed. Demos can be scheduled to run at specific times, enabling you to manage your time and capacity efficiently while providing flexibility to your customers.
Collaborate in Real-Time With Customers And Channel Partners Using Skytap Remote Access Console
You can set up a complete virtual data center (VDC) that mimics a production deployment of your solution on the Skytap cloud. You can then enable your prospects to access their VDC with Skytap Remote Access Client, a web-based console, from any location with internet connectivity. At the same time, you can collaborate with your customers in real-time and provide them step by step guidance. This cloud based demo model provides a compelling and engaging high fidelity solution experience without the time consuming environment set-up and tear-down.
Manage Multiple Customers, Channels and Opportunities with Skytap Groups and Projects
Using Skytap's Groups, Projects and Roles, sales managers can create different groups of users that represent specific roles (such as Western US SEs or North American channel partners) within the organization. You can create "best in class" demo templates and share those resources via Projects and assign specific Groups of users with customized Roles. You can also assign different levels of permissions and Skytap quota for each user Group to manage your costs in alignment with the various channels or sales territories. You can also enable your partners to create customized demo content that works with their particular solution which you can review and approve.
Demonstrate A Complete Solution With Differentiating Features Using Advanced Networks
Using Skytap, you can deploy a multi-tier solution with clustering and fail-over support in the cloud easily. You can create multiple networks in each configuration, add multiple network adapters to each virtual machine, connect them to different networks, configure routing policies and ensure you have an accurate depiction of production like environments in the cloud when you demonstrate your solution. You can create a Hybrid Cloud for each high value client, connect your customized demo instances to specific ERP systems using Skytap Connect (a 2way IPSec VPN tunnel) and show the full value of your solution. You can do all of that with just a simple point and click interface and save those advanced configurations as templates for rapid re-start or run multiple demos in parallel. This dramatically accelerates your sales team's productivity while giving you the power and flexibility you need to show your application integrating with complex enterprise applications in the cloud.
For an in-depth overview of Skytap's Cloud Automation Solution, download a white paper on 'Buyers Guide to Cloud Providers'.
