With hundreds of sales professionals worldwide, we were looking for a highly scalable cloud platform that could offer access to our latest demo and proof of concept builds. Using Skytap, our sales engineers are empowered to launch their own virtual environments in seconds and demo or provide a hosted proof-of-concept for any product in real time.- Neil Wilson, Technical marketing manager – OpenText
As a systems engineer (SE) or a field consultant, you know how difficult it is to deliver compelling technical product demonstrations and proof-of-concepts (POCs). Software solutions are more complex than ever, often consisting of multi-tiered environments and complex server configurations. Skytap's Cloud Automation™ empowers sales and consulting teams to create and deliver customized customer demos and friction-free customer POCs with an easy to access, fully hosted virtual environment. Gone are the days of waiting on IT, either in house or at your customer, to provision an environment so the customer can evaluate your software solution. Skytap revolutionizes the technical sales process which ultimately results in shorter sales cycles and more closed business.
Key Benefits:
- Deliver powerful, multi-machine customer demos over the Web
- Give customers instant 'proof-of-concept' environments
- Maintain a library of 'gold master' demos; capture and share best practice
- Complete proof-of-concept (POC) engagements faster and more effectively
- Spend time collaborating with customers instead of provisioning hardware
- Improve the customer evaluation experience
- Shorten sales cycle time and close more deals
Deliver powerful, multi-machine customer demos
Skytap enables field teams to spin up complex, multi-machine demos in the cloud and access them from any location. Skytap handles the most demanding demo scenarios, including enterprise-grade servers, networking scenarios, and complex integrations. Using Skytap's self-service Web UI, you have the ability to import your existing virtual machines, create a new demo environment from Skytap's Public Library of pre-built templates, or build completely from scratch. Skytap environments are infinitely customizable by each field team so SEs can show solutions that solve the specific problem facing each customer.
Give customers instant 'proof-of-concept' environments in the cloud
After qualifying a customer, you can provide them with instant access to a cloud-based proof-of-concept environment. The ability to take a custom demo and convert it instantly to a customer accessible hosted POC practically eliminates stalled deals due to hardware provisioning and onsite access roadblocks. When a customer needs help or guidance during the POC, SEs can easily use Skytap's Web-based 'over-the-shoulder' feature to guide them to a solution.
Maintain a library of 'gold master' demos; capture and share best practice
Skytap solves the problem of sharing the most up-to-date releases and demo builds with geographically distributed SE and consulting teams. 'Gold master' demos and builds can be stored as templates in the Skytap library and users can deploy these with a click of a button. Field teams can customize environments as needed for each scenario; once a demo is complete, the instance can be deleted and a new copy deployed for the next customer or the work can be saved for other SEs to leverage.
Super-charge productivity; reduce costs.
Preparing for a customer demo can take several hours, especially if the demo requires customization or collaboration with colleagues. Skytap enables SEs and consultants to be more productive, enabling real-time collaboration in the cloud and eliminating much of the manual effort to prepare for a customer meeting. Since Skytap is offered as a cloud-based service organizations can dramatically reduce IT spend by only paying for the demo and POC run time that they use.