Challenge
Informatica needed to accelerate provisioning and improve scalability of virtual labs to improve customers and instructor experiences without increasing costs.
Results
The ability to provision labs within two to three minutes has improved customer and instructor experiences while reducing costs. A full suite of controls paired with a simple UI integrated easily with existing LMS for a seamless experience.
About Informatica
Informatica Global Education Services (GES) provides more than twenty courses that span Informatica’s entire product line and are available to be completed onsite, in training centers around the globe, or in an innovative virtual academy. These courses are designed to help customers, partners, and internal employees fully adopt and optimize Informatica software in order to reach business goals.
Along with supporting Informatica’s developers, trainers, partners, and enablement managers by maintaining the company’s infrastructure and delivering rich content, the GES team is required to generate revenue for the company—while reducing the cost to do so.
Informatica’s Challenge
The main challenge Informatica faced is all too common in training departments that operate at a global scale. Many of its deliveries are done on custom hardware or internally hosted infrastructure and are inaccessible externally. Provisioning these deliveries for self-paced virtual training would take anywhere between eight to sixteen hours and caused headaches for customers and instructors alike.
Another challenge was dealing with confusion from students who struggled with how to access their labs or interact with a training interface. Because of the delay between deliverables, students would often open a support ticket and then be told to expect their class in as little as fifteen minutes, or as much as eight hours. This generated additional expenses for the GES team, and time had to be spent attending to customer concerns, instead of working to deliver a rich customer experience.
Long, unpredictable provisioning times also negatively impacted Informatica’s instructors. Being in front of customers prevented instructors from being able to take the time to troubleshoot time-sensitive problems. The GES team is responsible for not just improving the experience for customers and students but also the instructors themselves, and this is difficult when working with non-standardized hardware or multiple vendors.
Skytap Solution
Informatica turned to Skytap to help increase efficiency and operate in the leanest possible way, so that the company could continue to consistently improve customer experience. The company moved its onsite training facility systems to on-demand virtual training labs using Course Manager. Informatica delivers content to customers, partners, and internal employees on a daily basis, and the GES team plays an important role in generating revenue by helping these groups quickly promote integrations and adoption of the company’s product. The wide range of benefits provided by Course Manager allows the GES team to show Informatica leadership the cost-effectiveness of their operation, and their contributions to the company’s overall goal of a positive customer experience.
Outcomes
Course Manager has given Informatica training managers the ability to quickly provision new virtual labs and classrooms and run multiple classes instantly and in parallel. The ability to quickly scale classrooms up or down has resulted in improved customer experiences and easier product adoption, while reducing costs. Labs can be provisioned and made available within two to three minutes from the point of registration, and student self-enrollment has increased remote training.
The expensive and time-consuming tasks of buying or upgrading equipment, and manually configuring and installing software and class data can be handled by Skytap infrastructure. With a robust API and easy import and integration tools, Informatica was able to integrate its Learning Management Systems and custom training portals into Skytap.
Training managers report improved student experiences, and Course Manager’s quick lab access and simple UI also provide instructors and developers with seamless access to labs and better experiences. Course Manager gives instructors a suite of controls, including using “over the shoulder” views for collaboration, and the ability to start, suspend, and snapshot any training lab. Instructors can also provision student machines with a web UI anytime a student needs one.
“The most important thing that really caught our eye in the beginning with Skytap is that we can integrate with our learning management system and fire off labs that are available to students within two to three minutes from the point of registration.”
Alex Gurevich, Senior Manager of Global Education Services, Informatica
