Software Demos and Evaluations

Focus on selling and engage prospects to close more new business

Today's high-value clients seek personalized and compelling software demonstrations. Delivering an engaging experience can determine which solution wins (or loses) the business. Sales engineers and technical marketing managers 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 from the core mission—showing what the software does best, and winning more business.

Sales engineers and technical marketing managers ask the same question: How can your teams deliver fast, easy, and secure demos and proof-of-concepts on-demand?

Skytap Cloud resolves this software demo and evaluation dilemma

Skytap Cloud empowers sales teams with self-service cloud-based software demos and evaluation environments that provide frictionless customer collaboration. The net result: shorter sales cycles and more closed business.

Watch a complex IBM Websphere Application Environment deployed in less than 60 seconds in Skytap Cloud.Skytap Cloud empowers organizations to take their existing demonstration labs and software applications to the cloud without requiring any application rewrites. Sales engineers can create multiple custom software demo configurations in Skytap Cloud with an easy-to-use web UI. Configurations can be cloned and published securely on the Internet so that you can easily manage multiple prospect evaluations in parallel. You can easily interact and collaborate with your prospects as they engage with your software applications.

Sales engineers and technical marketing managers can centrally manage all the master or "golden template" software demo images, use access rights, team or group usage, and security policies. This top down view provides the visibility and control you need to efficiently run geographically distributed sales teams.

Skytap Cloud can be used for a broad range of scenarios, including:

  • Self-service, hosted software demos and evaluations
  • Customized, hosted proof-of-concepts replacing your physical servers
  • Rich and compelling self-service trials
  • New product release evaluations
  • Customer user acceptance testing
  • Product bake-offs for multiple platforms and databases
  • Evaluation of ERP back-end integrations
  • Evaluation of other on premises system integration
  • Real-time collaboration with prospects and channel partners

Top 5 Features and Benefits at a Glance

Feature Key Benefit
Skytap Cloud templates Accelerate software demos and evaluation cycles

  • Create customized multi-machine software demos in seconds
  • Create a central repository of master demo images and templates for easy provisioning and sharing
  • Capture the entire memory state of a custom multi-machine demo as a snapshot and save as a template for rapid re-use
Publish custom multi-machine demos with Skytap resource links Instant access to rich software demo and POC environments

  • Enable customers and partners to access virtual environments remotely from anywhere with just a browser
  • Publish URLs with granular access control for users for a single VM or the entire virtual data center environment
  • Capture and share best practice POC environments across distributed system engineering teams
Skytap Cloud SmartClient Collaborate in real-time with prospects and channel partners

  • Provide a compelling hands-on experience for your prospects, customers and channel partners
  • Demonstrate features and get an "over the shoulder" view of your prospect actions
Groups, projects, and roles Manage multiple customers, channels and opportunities

  • Organize your sales teams by territory, and manage opportunities and SE teams with projects
  • Share your demo and POC environments with your external partners and provide them best practice demo resources
  • Assign role specific permissions in project roles (engineers, partners, managers, prospects) and assign access rights
Advanced networks and hybrid clouds Demonstrate a complete solution with differentiating features

  • Create complex multi-tier networks with custom routing and security policies to power your applications
  • Use a two-way IPSec VPN to connect your demo to multiple back-end enterprise systems
  • Demonstrate the full strength of your solution in the cloud.

Accelerate software demos and evaluation

Using Skytap Cloud you can create a centralized repository of "golden templates" for demo images that include your applications with virtual machines, storage, and networking settings just as you would in your existing infrastructure. Sales engineers and technical marketing managers can use an easy-to-use web UI to provision new demos, customize each one and give customers access to create a hosted software demo environment on-demand. You can deploy demo environments 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 or backed up as a template for future use.

Instant access to rich demo and POC environments

Using SmartClient, you can schedule hands-on demo sessions for your high-value prospects and clients. Your clients can securely access the demo environment with any modern web browser and you can monitor, provide guidance, and offer 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 with prospects and channel partners

With Skytap Cloud you can set up a complete virtual data center that mimics your existing production deployment of your software application. You can then enable your prospects to access the virtual environment with SmartClient, a web-based console, from any location with Internet connectivity. At the same time, you can easily collaborate with your customers in real-time and provide them step by step guidance. This cloud-based demo model provides a compelling and engaging evaluation experience without the time-consuming environment setup and teardown.

Manage multiple customers, channels, and opportunities

Using the groups, projects, and roles features of Skytap Cloud, sales managers can create different groups of users that represent specific roles within the organization. You can create standardized "golden template" demo environments 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 Cloud quotas for each user group to manage your costs in alignment with various channels and 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 Skytap Cloud, you can deploy a multi-tier solution with clustering and fail-over support in the cloud. 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. You can create a hybrid cloud for each high-value client by connecting your customized demo environments using a secure IPsec VPN tunnel. With an easy-to-use point and click interface, you can save advanced configurations as templates for rapid re-start or run multiple demos in parallel. This accelerates your sales team's productivity while giving you the power and flexibility you need to demo your software application integrating with complex enterprise applications.