Enterprise LiveLabs

Enterprise LiveLabs is a hosted training solution that automates the delivery of lab environments for classroom training (virtual, onsite, and third-party) and e-Learning. LiveLabs provide training organizations with greater flexibility and efficiency, making training programs more successful -- growing revenue, reducing costs, and improving student satisfaction.

The Training Conundrum

Traditionally, technology vendors train their customers in two venues, at corporate-owned training centers or onsite at the customer location. Increasingly, however, the demand for onsite training has grown. Due to lower travel budgets, customers are demanding that training occurs at their convenience, on their schedule and at a location that is convenient for them. For this reason there has been a shift from corporate facility training to customer site training as well as virtual training and e-Learning.

However, supporting the delivery of labs outside of corporate owned facilities is logistically challenging and expensive. It often requires the shipping of “pods” of laptops back and forth from the various customer locations to the corporate headquarters. It forces trainers to be experts in lab setup and it puts a burden on the customer to source and procure equipment that meets the vendor’s specific requirements. It is capital intensive for the vendor in the form of new hardware, hardware maintenance and shipping costs. The training organization has to manage and support additional IT overhead to sustain this often-damaged equipment and re-configure it with new lab environments (“images”) between classes. Also there is administrative overhead to manage the schedule and logistics of which pods go where and when. This translates to lower equipment utilization levels and higher probability of failure (such as when a pod is delayed in shipping resulting in class delays or outright cancellation).

In addition to managing the logistics issues, how does a training organization extend its reach to service its most isolated customers, increase flexibility to respond to immediate training needs, and focus on its core business and not on logistics and IT?

The Solution - Enterprise LiveLabs

Enterprise LiveLabs enables vendors to focus on building new courses, recruiting new students and building more revenue. Instead of juggling multiple lab images for each delivery option (classroom, distance-learning, and offsite venues), LiveLabs unifies lab delivery under one hosted, centrally managed and automated offering.

Enterprise LiveLabs is a powerful, scalable, reliable, hosted lab solution for delivering training anywhere, at anytime. LiveLabs includes a “Ready-to-Train” lab environment, including management and administrative capabilities, all accessed over the Internet via a web browser.

With LiveLabs, a user can easily:

• Create lab images
• Test lab images
• Publish lab images into a centralized repository
• Schedule training events
• Deliver live, pre-configured lab environments anywhere, anytime
• Mentor students
• Manage student lab environments

LiveLabs provides an immediate return on investment, simply from reduced administration and improved hardware utilization. Best of all, LiveLabs enables organizations to pursue strategic training initiatives to better aggregate demand, respond to training needs, and provide additional services; such as adding a lab component to a virtual classroom. Most organizations initially deploy LiveLabs in a specific training venue (e.g. customer-site or virtual classroom) and rapidly build a compelling business case to adopt LiveLabs as their only lab delivery vehicle.

Centrally Managed Online Training Environment

Enterprise LiveLabs consolidates and centralizes the lab infrastructure in a managed, world-class data center facility. Since this infrastructure is accessible from anywhere, this results in several advantages:

• Significant reduction in hardware expense (server consolidation, lower maintenance costs and higher utilization of equipment)
• No overhead for associated hardware and IT- this expense alone can represent 20% of the total cost of ownership for hardware and is totally outsourced
• Respond to changes in demand (class cancellations, etc.) instantly
• Take advantage of idle capacity for internal and partner training
• No client-side requirements (e.g. memory, processor, etc.) other than an internet connected web-browser
• No shipping costs for sending equipment and materials to the training location
• Easier to support and maintain
• Update once, globally -- updates at the data center becomes available everywhere, instantly, without delay

Streamlined Lab Delivery and Management System

To deliver a remote lab today, a training administrator has to:

• create a lab image
• test it
• configure it on a pod of computers
• ship the computers
• have a resource setup the computers at the customer location
• run the class
• tear-down the lab setup
• and ship the computers back so they can be re-configured and prepped for the next class.

Enterprise LiveLabs automates this manually intensive, error-prone, and costly activity via a simple web-administration interface.

With LiveLabs, administrators simply schedule which image is to be deployed, for how many users, and when they want it available. LiveLabs automatically manages the capacity and performs all of the setup and teardown behind the scenes. This allows an organization to rapidly repurpose hardware for multiple classes without having to deal with lengthy delays for shipping, etc. Since the lab environments are accessible from anywhere, there is no setup at the customer location and resources are free to focus on more strategic initiatives such as course development or boosting class enrollments.

High Performance, Anytime, Anywhere Student Accounts

Enterprise LiveLabs has optimized performance to showcase the technology vendor’s products for the most productive training experience. Most users comment that they forget that they are working with a remote application within minutes of accessing a lab. LiveLabs was designed to be completely transparent to students. By virtue of being accessible from anywhere,

LiveLabs offers key benefits:

• Enables vendors to deliver training to remote geographies
• Enables the aggregation of demand for distance learning via virtual classrooms
• Enables instructors to mentor students by shadowing them with a "look-over-the-shoulder" capability
• Consumes minimal bandwidth, averaging less than 10kbps per student
• Firewall-friendly

Why LiveLabs for Enterprise Training makes sense for your business:

• Outsourced service that enables you to focus on your core business
• Fixed-cost service, with no high upfront capital costs
• Highest performance to showcase your applications in the best possible way
• Reliable service, backed by a comprehensive Service Level Agreement (SLA) and redundant systems to bring mission-critical uptime to your classroom training
• Secure service with required protection for your intellectual property
• Scalable service providing flexibility to adjust with your changing operational needs
• Experienced implementation and technical operations teams committed to your success
• Low-risk with pay-as-you-go pricing options
• Total end-user anonymity and privacy with simple access through choice of browser plug-in or java client
• Routing of all IP traffic over standard ports using 128-bit SSL encryption
• No hidden costs like support fees, upgrade fees, or maintenance costs
• 24x7x365 monitoring for early response to technical issues
• Application Programming Interface to integrate with in-house and LMS systems
• Compatible with web-conferencing solutions
• Quality of Service (QoS) lines for enhanced global delivery
• Web-based administration capabilities for remote scheduling and management of labs

For organizations looking to offer a more comprehensive and scalable training program, LiveLabs provides a compelling return on investment while enabling an order of magnitude improvement in flexibility, so you can focus on stimulating the minds of your learners.