Why Tech Vendors Should Use Disposable Cloud Resources for Sales Demos and Tech Training
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In a cloud-native world, your company is missing out on effectively highlighting the value of your product through demos and training if you don’t have easy access to cloud resources. However, due to security and data protection concerns, it's not uncommon that your team of sales engineers and technical trainers would not have easy access to your company's cloud resources.
By taking a proactive approach when accessing cloud resources like GCP or AWS, sales engineering and technical training teams are well-positioned to evolve with this shift in technology focus.
Through this blog article, we will look at key strategies that can help you navigate accessing vital cloud components easily—empowering your organization with best practices around usage models while reducing support costs associated with managing multiple environments.
TL;DR
- Without access to cloud resources, your demos and training suck, and fail to impress customers.
- Disposable cloud resources give you flexibility and agility while keeping costs under control
- 3 Real-life examples highlight how the disposable cloud gives you an edge
- And automatic clean-up gives you significant savings
- An ROI calculator of how much you can save using disposable cloud
- How Instruqt virtual IT labs platform can help you sell more and train better
The Costs of Not Having Easy Access to Cloud Resources
Demos and training are less realistic and less engaging
Trying to replicate complex infrastructures or multi-tiered architectures can become overwhelming and difficult. And when your audience doesn't fully understand how your solution works in real-life situations, it can lead to confusion and disappointment.
Your valuable engineering resources are wasted on non-core activities
As an alternative, you can set up and manage local environments if you can’t have access to cloud resources. But it can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. We've talked to many sales engineers and trainers who feel frustrated spending too much time on environment configuration, software installation, and data preparation. It detracts from their core responsibilities and limits their ability to deliver impactful demonstrations and training sessions. Why not free up your time and energy to focus on what matters by exploring some alternative options?
Inconsistent user experience is bad for conversion
You know how important it is to give customers a seamless experience during demos and training. But, let's face it, things can get messy without the cloud. With varying hardware and software setups, as well as network environments, glitches can pop up unexpectedly and disrupt the flow of your presentation. This inconsistency can leave a bad taste in your customer's mouths, making them hesitant to trust your product or solution.
How Disposable Cloud Resources Help Tech Vendors
What if there’s a cloud vending machine? You don’t need to own it but still enjoy the benefits of the cloud for demos and training.
Flexibility and Agility
Disposable cloud resources provide unparalleled flexibility and agility when demonstrating or training people on cloud-native technology. With disposable environments, you can quickly set up customized cloud configurations tailored to specific use cases or scenarios. These resources can be easily provisioned, modified, and discarded as needed, allowing seamless experimentation and adaptation to evolving requirements.
Isolation and Risk Mitigation
Disposable cloud resources enable demos and training in a controlled and isolated environment without impacting production systems. By isolating these activities, you can minimize the risk of errors, vulnerabilities, or disruptions that could potentially affect critical workloads or customer-facing applications. The temporary nature of these resources ensures that any issues or changes made during demos or training do not have long-lasting consequences.
Cost Optimization
Disposable cloud resources offer significant cost advantages by eliminating the need for dedicated infrastructure for demos and training. Instead of maintaining costly, underutilized infrastructure, you can leverage cloud providers' pay-as-you-go models, utilizing resources only when needed. This results in optimized resource allocation, reduced overhead costs, and enhanced ROI for tech vendors.
3 Real-life Examples of How Disposable Cloud Resources Help Tech Vendors Sell More and Train Better
- Cloud-Native Solution Demo
For example, if you are a software company that offers a cloud-native solution leveraging Kubernetes and server-less technologies. With disposable cloud resources, you can easily spin up a demo environment that mirrors your customer's infrastructure stack. This allows you to showcase the scalability, resilience, and performance of your solution in a realistic setting. You can also tailor the environment to highlight specific features, such as auto-scaling, seamless updates, and fault tolerance, creating a compelling demo that resonates with potential customers.
- Cloud-Native Training Program
Another example as a technology consulting company that offers a training program on cloud-native architecture for your clients' development teams. Using disposable cloud resources, you can provide each participant with an individual training environment. These environments can be pre-configured with the necessary tools, platforms, and cloud services, enabling participants to gain hands-on experience building and deploying cloud-native applications. The disposable nature of the resources ensures that your learners can experiment freely without fear of breaking anything, facilitating a more immersive and effective learning experience.
- Proof-of-Concept (PoC) Testing
For a tech vendor seeking to validate the feasibility and value of your cloud-native offering, you can set up a temporary environment that closely resembles your customer's infrastructure, allowing them to evaluate the solution's performance, scalability, and integration capabilities. The ability to spin up and tear down the environment as needed enables efficient testing and minimizes resource wastage.
Save on Costs with Automatic Cleanup
Automatic clean-up processes eliminate the need for manual intervention or oversight to remove temporary cloud resources. This ensures that resources are promptly and accurately disposed of when they are no longer needed. By avoiding unnecessary resource consumption, tech vendors can significantly reduce their cloud infrastructure costs, resulting in substantial cost savings.
Time Efficiency
Manual clean-up processes can be time-consuming and error-prone, diverting valuable engineering and administrative resources from core tasks. Automatic clean-up processes streamline the resource disposal workflow, freeing time and resources to focus on more critical activities such as innovation, product development, and customer support.
Enhanced Scalability
As the demand for demos and training sessions scales, manual clean-up becomes increasingly challenging to manage. With automatic clean-up processes, tech vendors can effortlessly handle large volumes of temporary cloud accounts and ensure swift resource disposal, maintaining a smooth and seamless experience for their customers and trainees.
ROI Optimization
By eliminating unused or forgotten resources, vendors can better align their infrastructure costs with usage during demos and training sessions. This ensures that resources are allocated efficiently, resulting in a higher return on investment and improved profitability.
Let’s do the Math and see how disposable cloud can save costs
Your cloud bills can spiral out of control without proper governance. And by the time your finance director realizes what's going on, it's too late, and the money has already been spent. On the other hand, disposable cloud resources, combined with automatic clean-up processes, yield substantial economic benefits for tech vendors. Let's consider a hypothetical scenario to illustrate the economic sense of this approach.
Imagine you spend $10,000 /month on maintaining infrastructure for demos and training purposes.
With disposable cloud resources and automatic clean-up, you can reduce your infrastructure costs by 50%, saving $5,000/month.
Additionally, the streamlined resource disposal workflow saves the equivalent of one full-time engineer's salary, estimated at $100,000/year.
The total annual cost savings amount to $5,000 * 12 months + $100,000 = $160,000.
This represents a significant reduction in operational expenses, allowing you to allocate resources to other critical areas, such as product development, marketing, or customer support.
Moreover, the optimized resource allocation and reduced overhead costs contribute to an improved ROI.
By eliminating wasteful spending and maximizing the utilization of cloud resources during demos and training, tech vendors can achieve higher returns on their investments, further boosting their profitability.
Instruqt - a virtual IT labs platform that offers Disposable Cloud Accounts
Instruqt is a hands-on virtual IT Lab for interactive learning. Instruqt sets up a safe, secure environment where you can run your software and offer your customers and prospects to learn from it. You can create product tutorials, demos, and training materials based on real-world scenarios and technology. Because it's browser-based, you won't have to worry about pesky firewalls, configuring laptops, or virtual machines!
With Instruqt, you have access to multi-cloud accounts, and you don't have to stress yourself with cleaning up your sandbox environments after training. Imagine finishing your training, and the first thing on your mind is not worrying about cleaning up your sandbox environments. That's exactly what Instruqt offers - automatic cleanup of your sandboxes. Plus, you'll save a lot of costs and time too.
To take advantage of these benefits, many vendors turn to Instruqt as their go-to platform for delivering virtual lab solutions. With a suite of tools designed specifically for tech training and demo workflows, Instruqt can help tech vendors easily set up and review temporary cloud accounts quickly and securely.
Get the success stories of tech vendors that sell more, market and train better with Instruqt.
In a cloud-native world, your company is missing out on effectively highlighting the value of your product through demos and training if you don’t have easy access to cloud resources. However, due to security and data protection concerns, it's not uncommon that your team of sales engineers and technical trainers would not have easy access to your company's cloud resources.
By taking a proactive approach when accessing cloud resources like GCP or AWS, sales engineering and technical training teams are well-positioned to evolve with this shift in technology focus.
Through this blog article, we will look at key strategies that can help you navigate accessing vital cloud components easily—empowering your organization with best practices around usage models while reducing support costs associated with managing multiple environments.
TL;DR
- Without access to cloud resources, your demos and training suck, and fail to impress customers.
- Disposable cloud resources give you flexibility and agility while keeping costs under control
- 3 Real-life examples highlight how the disposable cloud gives you an edge
- And automatic clean-up gives you significant savings
- An ROI calculator of how much you can save using disposable cloud
- How Instruqt virtual IT labs platform can help you sell more and train better
The Costs of Not Having Easy Access to Cloud Resources
Demos and training are less realistic and less engaging
Trying to replicate complex infrastructures or multi-tiered architectures can become overwhelming and difficult. And when your audience doesn't fully understand how your solution works in real-life situations, it can lead to confusion and disappointment.
Your valuable engineering resources are wasted on non-core activities
As an alternative, you can set up and manage local environments if you can’t have access to cloud resources. But it can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. We've talked to many sales engineers and trainers who feel frustrated spending too much time on environment configuration, software installation, and data preparation. It detracts from their core responsibilities and limits their ability to deliver impactful demonstrations and training sessions. Why not free up your time and energy to focus on what matters by exploring some alternative options?
Inconsistent user experience is bad for conversion
You know how important it is to give customers a seamless experience during demos and training. But, let's face it, things can get messy without the cloud. With varying hardware and software setups, as well as network environments, glitches can pop up unexpectedly and disrupt the flow of your presentation. This inconsistency can leave a bad taste in your customer's mouths, making them hesitant to trust your product or solution.
How Disposable Cloud Resources Help Tech Vendors
What if there’s a cloud vending machine? You don’t need to own it but still enjoy the benefits of the cloud for demos and training.
Flexibility and Agility
Disposable cloud resources provide unparalleled flexibility and agility when demonstrating or training people on cloud-native technology. With disposable environments, you can quickly set up customized cloud configurations tailored to specific use cases or scenarios. These resources can be easily provisioned, modified, and discarded as needed, allowing seamless experimentation and adaptation to evolving requirements.
Isolation and Risk Mitigation
Disposable cloud resources enable demos and training in a controlled and isolated environment without impacting production systems. By isolating these activities, you can minimize the risk of errors, vulnerabilities, or disruptions that could potentially affect critical workloads or customer-facing applications. The temporary nature of these resources ensures that any issues or changes made during demos or training do not have long-lasting consequences.
Cost Optimization
Disposable cloud resources offer significant cost advantages by eliminating the need for dedicated infrastructure for demos and training. Instead of maintaining costly, underutilized infrastructure, you can leverage cloud providers' pay-as-you-go models, utilizing resources only when needed. This results in optimized resource allocation, reduced overhead costs, and enhanced ROI for tech vendors.
3 Real-life Examples of How Disposable Cloud Resources Help Tech Vendors Sell More and Train Better
- Cloud-Native Solution Demo
For example, if you are a software company that offers a cloud-native solution leveraging Kubernetes and server-less technologies. With disposable cloud resources, you can easily spin up a demo environment that mirrors your customer's infrastructure stack. This allows you to showcase the scalability, resilience, and performance of your solution in a realistic setting. You can also tailor the environment to highlight specific features, such as auto-scaling, seamless updates, and fault tolerance, creating a compelling demo that resonates with potential customers.
- Cloud-Native Training Program
Another example as a technology consulting company that offers a training program on cloud-native architecture for your clients' development teams. Using disposable cloud resources, you can provide each participant with an individual training environment. These environments can be pre-configured with the necessary tools, platforms, and cloud services, enabling participants to gain hands-on experience building and deploying cloud-native applications. The disposable nature of the resources ensures that your learners can experiment freely without fear of breaking anything, facilitating a more immersive and effective learning experience.
- Proof-of-Concept (PoC) Testing
For a tech vendor seeking to validate the feasibility and value of your cloud-native offering, you can set up a temporary environment that closely resembles your customer's infrastructure, allowing them to evaluate the solution's performance, scalability, and integration capabilities. The ability to spin up and tear down the environment as needed enables efficient testing and minimizes resource wastage.
Save on Costs with Automatic Cleanup
Automatic clean-up processes eliminate the need for manual intervention or oversight to remove temporary cloud resources. This ensures that resources are promptly and accurately disposed of when they are no longer needed. By avoiding unnecessary resource consumption, tech vendors can significantly reduce their cloud infrastructure costs, resulting in substantial cost savings.
Time Efficiency
Manual clean-up processes can be time-consuming and error-prone, diverting valuable engineering and administrative resources from core tasks. Automatic clean-up processes streamline the resource disposal workflow, freeing time and resources to focus on more critical activities such as innovation, product development, and customer support.
Enhanced Scalability
As the demand for demos and training sessions scales, manual clean-up becomes increasingly challenging to manage. With automatic clean-up processes, tech vendors can effortlessly handle large volumes of temporary cloud accounts and ensure swift resource disposal, maintaining a smooth and seamless experience for their customers and trainees.
ROI Optimization
By eliminating unused or forgotten resources, vendors can better align their infrastructure costs with usage during demos and training sessions. This ensures that resources are allocated efficiently, resulting in a higher return on investment and improved profitability.
Let’s do the Math and see how disposable cloud can save costs
Your cloud bills can spiral out of control without proper governance. And by the time your finance director realizes what's going on, it's too late, and the money has already been spent. On the other hand, disposable cloud resources, combined with automatic clean-up processes, yield substantial economic benefits for tech vendors. Let's consider a hypothetical scenario to illustrate the economic sense of this approach.
Imagine you spend $10,000 /month on maintaining infrastructure for demos and training purposes.
With disposable cloud resources and automatic clean-up, you can reduce your infrastructure costs by 50%, saving $5,000/month.
Additionally, the streamlined resource disposal workflow saves the equivalent of one full-time engineer's salary, estimated at $100,000/year.
The total annual cost savings amount to $5,000 * 12 months + $100,000 = $160,000.
This represents a significant reduction in operational expenses, allowing you to allocate resources to other critical areas, such as product development, marketing, or customer support.
Moreover, the optimized resource allocation and reduced overhead costs contribute to an improved ROI.
By eliminating wasteful spending and maximizing the utilization of cloud resources during demos and training, tech vendors can achieve higher returns on their investments, further boosting their profitability.
Instruqt - a virtual IT labs platform that offers Disposable Cloud Accounts
Instruqt is a hands-on virtual IT Lab for interactive learning. Instruqt sets up a safe, secure environment where you can run your software and offer your customers and prospects to learn from it. You can create product tutorials, demos, and training materials based on real-world scenarios and technology. Because it's browser-based, you won't have to worry about pesky firewalls, configuring laptops, or virtual machines!
With Instruqt, you have access to multi-cloud accounts, and you don't have to stress yourself with cleaning up your sandbox environments after training. Imagine finishing your training, and the first thing on your mind is not worrying about cleaning up your sandbox environments. That's exactly what Instruqt offers - automatic cleanup of your sandboxes. Plus, you'll save a lot of costs and time too.
To take advantage of these benefits, many vendors turn to Instruqt as their go-to platform for delivering virtual lab solutions. With a suite of tools designed specifically for tech training and demo workflows, Instruqt can help tech vendors easily set up and review temporary cloud accounts quickly and securely.
Get the success stories of tech vendors that sell more, market and train better with Instruqt.
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