Virtual Lab (cont)
In this part 3b we’ll explore the requirements and options for building out a virtual lab environment. Every sales organization will get varying degrees of benefit from this strategy. I’ll assume you are selling a product that can be virtualized at least to a certain extent. Here is an outline of the basic steps to follow:
- Create a project team- This needs to be made of up of SE management/enablement, subject-matter product experts, and ideally representatives from IT, PM, Sales, and Marketing. Services and Support may not be a bad idea either depending on scope and politics of the company.
- Define strategy - In most organization, central labs will not completely replace regional and home labs. Determine the yearly budgets for each one. This is also extremely important because in any large company you will have staunch detractors from those that value the ability to “touch” their labs.
- Set the requirements - make sure all stakeholders have a say in the requirements so that all functions are on board with the desired outcome.
- Evaluate solutions.
I’m going to stop there and expand on your options. There are three basic approaches:
- Outsource
- Purchase a solution
- Custom build a solution
Each has its pros and cons.
Outsource
The first option is to completely outsource the solution to a vendor to manage. I am aware of a handful of these vendors with Surgient being the current leader in this space based on my previous research. Back to the Microsoft example: They leverage Citrix XenServer through a demo partnership portal service runaware. I do find it a bit amusing they rely on the competitive platform of Xen instead of something built atop their Virtual Server platform, but I’m sure each business unit is free to leverage the vendors that best fit the need. As for the pros/cons of this approach:
The pros include:
- No in-house expertise needed
- No system administration
- No upgrade and support processes required (i.e. always up-to-date)
- Benefit of the vendor’s expertise
- Subscription pricing (less up front costs)
The cons include:
- Static environment. You’re locked into the features provided by the vendor
- Limited to virtual hardware (you can’t add your own hardware)
- Disk is expensive, meaning growth is expensive under the subscription pricing
- Highest price tag, though depending on the organization could still be the best value. This depends heavily on your companies resources in housing something like this in your own environment
Purchase a Solution
A purchased on-site solution is the middle ground between doing it yourself and outsourcing. You can buy software that can manage the environment for you with your company providing the hardware and connection resources. Surgient also plays in this space as does VMLogix and VMware through its recent acquisition of Dunes.
Pros:
- You can tailor to your environment without the need to build it from scratch
- Expansion is less expensive and tied more closely to memory/disk costs than anything else
- Your own hardware needs can be integrated into the virtual environment
Cons:
- Far more management intensive. You need to manage all aspects of the environment. This can be a definite challenge for some IT organizations
Custom build a solution
Most virtual machine platforms like Xen, Microsoft, and VMware provide some access to the software through APIs which means you could theoretically build a virtual machine management platform from scratch.
Pros:
- Exactly tailored to your requirements. You are not locked in to a vendor’s solution beyond the virtual computing platform, though you could even build one of those if wanted to using XenSource
- May be the only option for certain types of product requirements
Cons:
- Highest up front costs
- Requires extensive expertise
- Dependent on yourself for upgrades
Costs
Each method has its own cost considerations. Depending on your company, any of these might provide the best value. Your organization’s finance rep and IT can help you more accurately estimate the cost of each over time.
The remainder of the project can vary greatly depending on the course of action you choose. Though the SE organization may often times drive the initial project requirements for this type of project, it is best of it does not live there from an ownership standpoint. To gain the most out of this solution, all of the product sales tools and documentation need to be aligned behind the same common themes and storylines. This is ideally a marketing function but I’ve seen it live in several others. The constant challenge is making sure it is being widely adopted, consistently implemented, and always up-to-date. These functions should be kept where the appropriate expertise lives and this is not (well, should not be) the core competence of the SE organization.
Still, given the importance and potential value, the SE management chain should not have any reservations about spreading the word and enlisting the help of others to get it off the ground. Once the sales organization reaches a certain size you almost can’t afford not to investigate a virtual lab. Your ROI sheet could easily show 4 figures.
—
This concludes my three-part series on lab use and design. I hope it has been useful. My next set of topics will be the review of several SE resources. It may take a little longer to do the research on these, so look for something in 10-12 days from now.
Related Posts at thesalesengineer.com
Filed under: Demo, Lab, Management, Marketing, Presentation, Proof of Concept, Sales, Strategy, Training
