Enable your team, partners and customers through outcome-focused hands-on experiences.
Virtual labs have become an essential tool for software training and enablement, providing immersive hands-on experiences that accelerate skill development, enhance user engagement and ultimately drive revenue. Find out how virtual labs create measurable outcomes for enterprise software organizations that need to enable customers, employees and partners.
In this article:
- What does it mean to "labify" your software and why does it matter?
- Which use cases benefit most from virtual labs? Explore examples and the top 5 signs you should labify.
- FAQs – Get answers to popular questions about implementing and driving business results with virtual labs.
What does it mean to “labify” your software?
While “labify” may not become the word of the year, get nerdy with us for a moment and consider updating your personal spellcheck with this new hands-on term:
Labify
verb
The process of configuring software into a virtual lab environment that can be provisioned at scale to demonstrate a software’s functionality and/or educate an audience with hands-on experiences.
Which use cases benefit most from virtual labs?
Explore scenarios where organizations choose to labify software into a scalable solution to have the greatest impact.
1. Your software solves complex problems or processes.
Virtual labs are a critical tool for organizations selling or licensing complex software, especially to businesses that require customized solutions. Virtual labs are particularly advantageous for software that serves multiple purposes, has diverse use cases and involves complex setup requirements necessitating thorough training for correct implementation.
Example use case: Virtual labs for technical sales enablement.
Beyond augmenting technical sales training, virtual labs can be used to provide demos to potential customers, showcasing the software’s capabilities in a tangible manner. This helps build customer confidence in the software while accelerating the sales process.
Expanding beyond the training use case, Calix is enabling sales engineers with lab environments of their solutions that are easy to share with prospects.
Calix added new revenue streams and increased engagement across their entire learning ecosystem by 20% since integrating hands-on labs into training.
Learn more about how Calix uses virtual labs throughout their training and enablement ecosystem.
2. Your software is highly configurable, serves many functions or multiple types of user roles.
Does your software serve multiple user types or roles, such as standard users and admins or sales professionals and project managers? Does it have a variety of feature sets with dedicated purposes, such as a CRM as well as contracts and invoicing? What about a robust API framework? Or multiple deployment options such as cloud, on-prem or even a container image? If your software can be deployed in many ways, serve multiple roles and can require custom configuration, virtual labs can help.
To help deliver successful integrations, using performance-based labs to train, validate and certify partners creates measurable ways to verify when your partners are ready to implement your software and meet the complex needs of your customers. Virtual labs can also be catered to different user types to help customers across various roles build skills directly related to the tasks and outcomes they need to achieve with your software.
Example use case: Virtual labs for partner enablement.
How do you reskill and certify more than 1,000 partners, validate that they’re job ready and increase sales velocity in less than 12 months? That’s exactly what Quest Software had to figure out.
Quest Software quickly shifted their technical partner enablement from Instructor-led training (ILT) to on-demand training with Skillable. Their new integrated training ecosystem allows Quest to deliver live, in-software environments for hands-on practice capable of automated skill validation and performance-based certification testing. Some of the benefits and results include:
- Leveraging automated skill validation via scored labs which led to time savings of eight or more hours a week for Instructors who were previously tasked with manual scoring and relied solely on in-person training. This enabled them to automate their certification issuing process, leading to an 85% decrease in operating costs per candidate.
- Integrating labs into their training ecosystem and partner portal so it’s easier for partners to access training on-demand. Creating this truly scalable solution led to a 244% increase in training consumption and 183% increase in partner-led sales.
Quest Software
Learn more about how Quest Software delivers scalable technical education to partners worldwide.
3. You want to drive more effective and scalable customer onboarding.
If your customer success team is critical to onboarding and delivering faster time to value, virtual labs can help you expand the efficacy, efficiency and capacity of your teams. Beyond training and onboarding CSMs, virtual labs can augment your existing customer enablement ecosystem with contextualized and scalable hands-on experiences.
Virtual labs enable customers to practice in a controlled environment, build confidence and achieve faster time to value. On-demand labs can also help onboard new team members as your customers’ workforce changes over time. By using live, in-software environments that evolve with your product, virtual labs eliminate the need for time-consuming updates to demo videos and screenshots used in traditional enablement materials. Transform training into an engaging experience that’s tailored for each user while freeing up your CSMs to help customers that need it most. Lab activity data also equips CSMs with product usage insights that can help identify customer friction points and provide targeted support, enabling CSMs to help customers become job-ready faster.
Example use case: Virtual labs for job readiness and customer enablement.
Majesco partnered with Skillable to quickly create and launch an experience-driven training program that develops and validates the skills and job readiness of employees and customers at scale. Learn how.
4. You want to validate job readiness or bolster certifications.
Use hands-on labs to accelerate exam readiness, boost candidate confidence and raise the caliber of your program by certifying more high-quality, job-ready individuals. Virtual labs offer a safe practice environment with real-time feedback via scored labs, allowing candidates to focus on areas for improvement, hone their skills, and reach the exam stage more confidently and quickly.
As industry leaders like Microsoft, Tanium and Pearson VUE look to bolster the credibility, validity and market value of certifications, exams need to go beyond proof of knowledge and show proof of skill. Performance-based testing requires test takers to demonstrate skill which people can’t pass with a downloaded answer key, exam dump or AI. This makes Skillable’s virtual labs an ideal addition to high-stakes exams for critical roles like cybersecurity.
High-caliber certifications have the added benefit of driving brand loyalty. By making your certifications more robust and meaningful, professionals will seek them out as proof of skill to share with their professional circles and employers will make them hiring requirements.
Example use case: Virtual labs for certification programs.
Pearson VUE offers virtual labs as a component of their certification prep product to increase candidate confidence to move forward with exams. They also leverage high-stakes lab environments during exams to validate skills.
If you provide content to someone with no hands-on capability – especially in complicated technology subjects like cybersecurity or cloud or AI – it's kind of meaningless because you don't have any context for that knowledge. "
Pearson VUE
Learn more about how Pearson VUE is helping certification candidates overcome the challenges of exam prep by complementing text and video-based content with hands-on experiences.
5. You want to increase engagement and product adoption at user events.
Live events, user conferences and product roadshows are a big investment of both time and budget, and today’s conference goers demand more than big-name keynote sessions and networking opportunities. Seventy percent of attendees say that in-person events are the best sources for training and professional content – now how can you make it 100%?
Boost engagement with hands-on workshops of your actual software. When attendees experience your software firsthand it turns the theoretical into the tangible – making hands-on labs a strategic way to drive attendance, increase engagement focused on improving software adoption and create product champions leading to more customer loyalty.
Example use case: Virtual labs at in-person events.
Hands-on experiences at events can take many forms. Popular applications include live demos during general or breakout sessions, as well as expert-led or self-paced hands-on workshops and labs. Use hands-on labs during beta testing and feedback sessions to attract early adopters and brand evangelists while generating valuable insights for your engineers and product teams. Additionally, offering opportunities for certification preparation and testing incentivizes participation, providing attendees with credentials and badges that they can proudly share with colleagues.
Learn how Hyland Software™ successfully scaled hands-on product training at events. Read the case study.
Upgrade your enablement with virtual labs.
Whether you’re looking to train new users, enable partners or engage attendees at upcoming events, virtual labs offer a versatile and effective solution.
Learn more about the benefits of virtual labs and dive into how to get started with hands-on learning.
Looking for more guidance?
Check out our free guide to modernizing training and enablement with hands-on learning.
FAQs
1. Why labify your software?
Virtual labs can serve a critical role within your enablement program to speed up time to value, create operational efficiencies, reduce customer churn and drive revenue for your organization. Learn more about the benefits of virtual labs, achieving the SaaS Growth Trifecta and how to modernize your enablement with hands-on software labs.2. How can I get started implementing virtual labs for my software?
Tap into our in-depth guide How to Get Started with Hands-on Learning and Virtual IT Labs. If you’re experienced with hands-on labs, here’s a guide to finding the best virtual IT lab provider.
3. What are the costs associated with labifying software?
Skillable primarily uses a consumption-based pricing model. This means two key factors go into how much your virtual labs will cost: 1. How many lab hours are needed annually, and 2. The size of the labs (e.g., a lab that requires 32GB of RAM would cost more per hour than a lab that is 8GB).
The consumption-based model makes it easy to calculate your organization’s per-year costs up front – without the headache of managing per-seat licenses or juggling user assignments that may go unused. If you’d like to learn more about pricing and what’s possible with virtual labs, contact our team for an introductory call.
4. What are some specific examples of companies that have successfully labified their software?
Leading companies that rely on Skillable to labify their software include Microsoft, Omnissa, Veritas, F5 and more. Find out how Skillable’s approach to virtual software labs is helping organizations drive tangible results in our customer success stories.
5. What are the success metrics for labifying software?
High-level success metrics for SaaS companies using virtual labs include product adoption and utilization, but specific KPIs depend on the specific use case. Explore example SaaS Growth Trifecta KPIs broken down by use case.
6. What are the common challenges faced during the implementation of virtual labs?
Common challenges will vary based on use case, organizational structure and the previous solution that was in place. To learn more, explore our in-depth guide How to Get Started with Hands-on Learning and Virtual IT Labs. The guide covers important topics, including common concerns about getting started with virtual labs, best practices for virtual training labs and how to avoid common virtual lab development mistakes.
7. How do virtual labs enhance user engagement and learning outcomes?
Virtual labs accelerate skill development, increase critical thinking and validate skills at scale, making them a critical component of training and enablement programs. Learn more in our article 10 benefits of hands-on virtual training labs.
8. Are virtual labs the same as simulations?
While simulations and virtual labs may seem similar at first, the technologies are fundamentally different. Simulations offer a replica of an environment via screenshots and videos. Virtual labs use live software environments for a realistic experience that stays up to date alongside your software.
Learn more about the definitions and differences between simulations and virtual labs in our comparison article.
Virtual lab Hot Takes
Check out our hands-on learning and virtual lab Hot Takes
