about us
Our Story
“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand”
―Confucius
It all started in 2016 when a team of engineers at Xebia co-organized Hashicorp’s first European conference in Amsterdam. They wanted to show visitors how to use Hashicorp tools. So they thought what better way to do that than to let the visitors experience through learning by doing?
They came up with the idea of creating sandbox environments based on the HashiCorp tools (Nomad, Consul, Terraform and Vault), and gave visitors a series of puzzles designed to let them experience the tools first hand by solving challenges. About ⅓ of the delegates participated. Some even went back to the hotel to finish all the challenges, because the wifi signal was stronger. The visitors came to learn perhaps one tool but left with hands-on experience in all of them. The seed for Instruqt’s gamified learning platform was planted.
Thereafter, Hashicorp invited the team to speak at Hashiconf in the US on the values of gamified learning infrastructure. The team built a second iteration of the environment which was completely browser-based for this event. It also sparked the team to focus on designing a scalable solution to train the mass without a whole lot of setup time.
The learning platform was validated at a customer in early 2017. This company was in the process of adopting Docker containers and was migrating to AWS. Instruqt was essential to deliver the required hands-on practical experience to their employees with all these technologies in a safe way and empowered them to take ownership of their new Cloud Platform.
And officially launched at Google Cloud Next
Recognizing the immense values this learning platform can bring for tech upskilling, Xebia has decided to invest in forming a new company under its umbrella, Instruqt. In March 2017, Instruqt was officially launched at Google Cloud Next (GCN) in San Francisco and was used to showcase the power of the Google Cloud technologies.
The visitors were blown away by the Instruqt learning platform hosted on retro-style arcades. Since then, these arcades built by Instruqt are featured at Google events around the world.
Helping enterprises upskill IT engineers at scale
In January 2020, Instruqt has formed a collaboration with the business units at Xebia, including GoDataDriven, Binx, Xebia DevOps, and Xebia Security to offer learning paths using its challenge-driven platform to help engineers at enterprises to get up to speed with technologies critical for success in digital transformation. As we enter a new decade, the platform will help enterprises address the urgent need to upskill hundreds – thousands of IT engineers continuously with cost-effective learning solutions.
About Xebia Group
Xebia Group consists of seven specialized, interlinked companies: Xebia, Xebia Academy, StackState, GoDataDriven, Xpirit, Binx.io, and Instruqt. With offices in Amsterdam, Utrecht, and Hilversum (Netherlands), Paris, Delhi, Bangalore and Boston, it employs over 1000 people worldwide and generates 100 million in revenue.
The services and product solutions address digital strategy; agile transformations; DevOps and continuous delivery; big data and data science; cloud infrastructures; agile software development; quality and test automation; and agile software security.