OpenText’s Challenge
Neil Wilson, technical marketing manager at OpenText, is responsible for supporting over 300 sales consultants with complex software demos. The sales team provided demos using virtual machines on laptop computers. This approach quickly turned into a challenge as they needed to bring multiple machines to customer meetings to showcase their complex ECM software suite. It was also becoming costly to provision laptops powerful enough to run complex enterprise applications such as SharePoint or SAP.
Wilson started investigating cloud solutions that could automate the provisioning of sales demo environments and enable his team to:
Quickly spin up sales demo environments
Remotely address customer obstacles or concerns
Provide self-service access to virtual IT environments to minimize lost productivity
Improve the customer evaluation experience and shorten sales cycles
In addition to the cost of providing their consultants with powerful laptops, the sales team was also faced with a shift in strategy. To keep ahead of the market, OpenText made the decision to move from a provider of point solutions to become a suite-based vendor. As a consequence, the sales team needed to demo multiple products in order to showcase the complete suite solution, and the simultaneous use of multiple products on multiple machines created performance problems during demos.
The sales team was also challenged with quickly addressing customer questions during the sales process. If a customer wanted to see a follow up demo of a specific feature set, the sales engineer would often have to travel back to the customer’s office and spin up a new demo – a costly and time consuming undertaking.
Additionally, OpenText wanted to increase the rate at which it updated its sales demos. The company produced demo DVDs, which it distributed to the field once or twice a year. Demos quickly became outdated and it was difficult for the sales team to keep up to date with the latest offerings. Based on these challenges, Wilson knew he needed to identify a better solution for sales demos, and decided to take a look at the cloud.