Virtualization Training Update

Earlier this year I posted regarding formalized virtualization training curriculum that we were going to launching in our organization.  I have received many e-mails since then asking for an update and how it has been going, so, here it is…

So far, we have conducted a handful of sessions with our Introduction to Virtutalization session with mainly sales and marketing employees in attendance.  The class was focused around understanding what virtualization is and what its potential is for our business.  It also walked through setting up and running a Windows VM on a laptop machine.  The class also admittedly (and not accidentally) had an evangelistic undertone.  As mentioned in my previous article, we feel that the case for virtualization builds itself from the bottom of the organization (users) up (upper management), and not the other way around.  It has been very well received and highly rated.  We are currently working on curriculum for our “advanced” level class which we plan to begin offering in the fall which will mainly focus on the implications on virtualization in deploying our software solution.  We have already noticed a return on our investment, as sales personnel are out in the field with custom VMs for every situation.

In addition to our employees, we are working to build an educational awareness campaign with out partner and customer community.  Last fall, we did a survey to find out what people’s thoughts and perceptions were about our support for virutalization.  What we found is that there was a lot of questions and discomfort.  In response, we have put on two webinars for our partners and end-users that have achieved some of the highest attendance numbers of any of our organizational training webinar broadcasts so far.  We have also published an FAQ style article and got approved for a session on virtualization for our annual technical conference.  Finally, we have a whitepaper in the final editing stages to provide the type of guideance that we have found that organizations are asking for from their software vendors.

Although it may be a little less tangible to measure, we are expecting a ROI for these efforts as well of the next few years.  Virtualization is a “hot” topic right now and building awareness accross and outside your organization is becoming increasingly important.