Challenge
When building a new partner network, ASG Technologies, now a Rocket Software company, had the difficult but critical task of getting partners to understand, place and implement its product suites. The company also needed solutions for conducting internal sales training for its pre-sales engineers and creating customer demo environments while controlling access and costs.
Results
With Skytap Virtual IT Labs, ASG Technologies was able to create training programs for the most relevant products much faster than if each had to be created manually. Skytap enabled ASG to train and properly equip partners’ salespeople, pre-sales engineers, and technical consultants with the knowledge needed to best evangelize ASG to their customers.
ASG Technologies is the only solutions provider for both Information Management and IT Systems Management. Its Information Management solutions capture, manage, govern and enable companies to understand and support all types of information. ASG provides mission-critical technology solutions for hybrid enterprises around the world.
ASG’s Challenge
In 2017, ASG Technologies, now a Rocket Software company, began building and expanding its partner network. The company needed its partners to understand, place and implement its product suites with their own customer bases, a requirement which was tantamount to the success of these partnerships and also one of the most challenging tasks the company faced in getting its new network off the ground. Crucially, ASG needed a way to provide partners with access to virtual labs for sales enablement and product demo purposes.
In a highly competitive global industry and dealing with its recent acquisition by Rocket Software, ASG Technologies needed to provide demos for internal seller training as well as for prospective customers. Whichever solution it picked, it wanted to modernize IT infrastructure, bolster global availability, improve scalability, reduce the internal resource strains on IT staffing and overhead as well as save money on capital expenditure.
Business Outcomes
After experiencing rapid success with its new partner network, ASG soon deployed Skytap training for its own internal pre-sales engineers, “who used it to create complex IT landscapes with a mouse click for product demos for sales and on technical levels, as well as to perform POCs for customers,” explained Lothar.
“Skytap’s value is demonstrated by the number of templates available [and] its speed in deploying even complex environments, not only on the endpoint level, but especially at the network level.”
– Lothar Wilhelm, Rocket Software Senior Director of Learning and Development
Added to this is the great flexibility in making environments available to customers who have strict policies on accessing third party systems. With Skytap sharing portals and native cost control capabilities, ASG has greater control over access and spend, making Skytap a perfect fit for the growing company.
After this successful project, ASG is now considering expanding Skytap usage to encompass product beta testing and quality assurance as part of its go-to-market strategy, as well as product trials for potential customers. As Lothar puts it, “the journey with Skytap is not over.”
