Overview

Making the adoption of DevOps tooling simple

HashiCorp is the leader in infrastructure automation for multi-cloud environments. HashiCorp builds solutions that enable innovation at global enterprises, offering them a common cloud operating model via consistent workflows to provision, secure, connect, and run their infrastructure with any application.

Their foundational technologies are open source and developed openly, and have been since their founding. HashiCorp’s mission is to create tools that unlock the cloud operating model for every business and enable its digital transformation strategies to succeed.

Challenge

Product education plays a key role in sales. HashiCorp focuses on creating memorable and effective prospect events to support pre-sales and sales, such as workshops and demos. Before Instruqt, HashiCorp’s sales team would store all their sales and field enablement content in GitHub repositories.

Their solutions engineers and technical staff were responsible for creating the technical boilerplate for environments, bootstrapping their products, and providing step-by-step instructions for their most popular use cases in READMEs. Their solution for provisioning was bash and a few of their tools: Terraform, Packer, and Vagrant. This solution was pragmatic and effective until it no longer was.

Buggy homegrown virtual lab learning platform

HashiCorp's Homegrown virtual IT lab was slow to build, unreliable, boring, and couldn’t scale to support marketing and sales activities like boosting product adoption, growing product engagement, and fueling lead generation.

Unproductive workflow

In large sessions, it became tough for their instructors to debug issues on their participants’ laptops and cloud accounts. Cloud policies, misconfigurations, and a mix of operating systems presented myriad problems that frustrated participants and withdrew from HashiCorp’s overall product narratives.

High cloud resource costs

HashiCorp’s products are directly tied to cloud outcomes, and deploying to those environments is fundamental to their enablement effort. To reduce friction, they have created dedicated training cloud accounts and subscriptions for their trainees, which require a lot of time and effort to implement controls for security and manage the resource lifecycle for cost. The complexity they introduced ultimately led to a heavy operational burden on their team. 

Unscalable processes

As an organization, HashiCorp saw value in standardized learning content, but as its catalog grew, it needed help to maintain reliability and consistency in its content. They could never implement a testing framework in-house due to their shifting priorities. These inconsistencies led to a need for more broad adoption internally.

Solution

Redefining Virtual IT Labs for Workshops and Demos Experiences

Seamless, browser-based access

Friction is one of the biggest enemies of the bounce rate and poor enablement outcomes. The Instruqt UX is amazing. You need a browser and a good attitude, and you can start learning ASAP.

“With Instruqt, we can reduce the barrier to entry for our content to almost zero.” 

Access to Cloud Environments

HashiCorp’s solutions engineers and technical staff can offload the creation and management of their cloud enablement sandboxes to the Instruqt platform.

“Participants love learning in a familiar cloud environment, and we get security and cost control completely out of the box.”

Framework Testing

Instruqt’s testing feature lets HashiCorp’s team know that all their content is working correctly. This feature allows them to have a small team of fewer than ten people, asynchronously supporting content for 100s of internal stakeholders. Instruqt is entirely woven into their pipeline jobs to test all content nightly and when changes are made.

The Results

In the first two quarters, after implementing Instruqt, HashiCorp has:

• 3000+ unique HashiCorp Product Workshops participants 
• 15% increase of new total pipeline
• 15+ on-demand workshops created for their products
• 90%+ Positive Workshop Experience Feedback

Are you considering Instruqt?

Here is some advice from Lance Larsen, the Regional Manager for Consul Solutions Engineering at HashiCorp

1. Treat Instruqt as a first-class program in your organization’s sales enablement strategy. Assign operational resources, schedule lunch and learning sessions, formal program management, etc.

2. Invest in a framework – Create best practices guides for internal consumption. A few gold standard tracks for the rest of the organization to leverage will get a lot of mileage and make it easier to crowdsource development.

3. Require testing – If you ensure the content always works, the adoption will follow. The platform will speak for itself.