iland Introducing Cloud-Based LabEngine

iland Internet Solutions Corporation announced the availability of LabEngine.

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This service is available from the company’s US, UK, Netherlands, Australia and Singapore cloud datacentres.

LabEngine enables organisations to rapidly deploy and scale cloud-based environments for training, demos, and sales enablement. Until now, building a virtual training environment was expensive and time-consuming. Demo labs were costly and underutilised, and proof-of-concepts required investment in time from the customer. With on demand virtual labs powered by LabEngine, companies can deliver high quality content in an easy-to-manage, scalable, cost-effective and reliable environment.

“At Nimble Storage, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, we are always looking for innovative ways to enable our internal and channel engineering teams to train and demo our technologies, including InfoSight Predictive Analytics. We partnered with iland to provide a scalable, on demand, cloud-based training platform to support our global sales engineering training. This has let our team focus on delivering the highest quality content without worrying about the infrastructure needed to support it,” said Randy Hopkins, VP, systems engineering, Nimble Storage, Inc. “Based on the success we’ve already seen with LabEngine, we plan to use it to power our proof-of-concept lab, which we expect will optimise and compress our sales process.“

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LabEngine enables users to create elaborate environments including nested hypervisors, complex networking and multiple VMs. Customers can migrate existing VMs or quickly create new ones in the iland platform and develop lab templates to save and deploy at scale.

Through a simple user interface, these environments can be scheduled for remote access for internal or external customers to access exact copies of these environments. Lab owners can provision environments on demand, tying into the company’s Secure Cloud Console. The LabEngine is a cost effective, scalable and agile solution organisations can use to deliver content to consumers, instead of worrying about infrastructure. Pay-as-you-go pricing and rapid scale means these environments can be used when needed, without fixed capital overhead.

“At our global conference, VeeamON 2017, iland powered the Hands-on Labs, which allowed our customers to gain a deeper understanding of our entire product portfolio and learn how to utilise Veeam to its fullest,” said Scott Lillis, VP, systems engineering, North America, Veeam Software AG. “By utilising iland LabEngine, we provided high-performing, scalable, hands-on labs built to withstand the demands of a full tradeshow like VeeamON. It enabled us to deliver top-notch instruction to our customers throughout the entire event.“

Sales teams can leverage these scalable environments to provide repeatable, flawless product demos, or even deliver a demo environment to a potential customer.

“Organisations that provide software or virtual appliances, are often challenged in orchestrating proof of concepts and free trials. Proof of concepts can be costly and time consuming, while free trials may be a lackluster experience for the end-customer without enough data to see the real benefits of the product,” said Dante Orsini, SVP, business development, iland. “With iland LabEngine, organisations can quickly and cost-effectively deploy a completely controlled, data-rich test environment streamlining their sales process and dramatically improving the effectiveness of their demos and proofs of concept.“

IT departments are expected to deliver swift and scalable solutions to internal teams that prefer temporary infrastructure solutions.

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LabEngine helps them quickly create and deploy environments that can be used for a variety of use cases:

• Training departments can deliver high-quality, repeatable training environments without building an environment from scratch for every class.

• Field sales can provide proofs of concept, demos or test drive pre-sales engagements with potential customers.

• Field events can produce hands on labs training at various trade shows and events.

• Marketing and product management can receive beta feedback or even fail proof demonstrations.

LabEngine key features:

• Manage all available templates – upload, create, deploy and revert all from an intuitive user interface over a single pane of glass.

• Easily migrate or create VMs to develop templates to be saved and deployed in scale.

• Create complex environments including nested hypervisors, virtual appliances and complex networking schemes.

• Deploy and revert environments on demand or schedule them with a built-in calendar function.

• Manage users directly from the UI and email enablement materials like training guides and product brochures.

• Access environments from anywhere in the world.

• Open consoles to any running environment to help proctor or assist a user.

• Provide full API access for integration into other applications such as training or sales management systems.

• Spin up and spin down entire environments as needed, eliminating costly idle resources during down time with pay-as-you-go access