While setting up a Proof of Concept is a great way to evaluate software solutions it can also be very time and resource consuming. Getting the budget is one thing, finding the time, and (right) people for the job is another. Let alone some of the more technical challenges that you’ll have to face and figure out. At the very least, even if the product(s) is/are simple to use you’ll still need to go through the basic installation and configuration steps, go over some of the FAQ’s, and so on before being able to get some testing done – it’s a fact of IT life as we know it. Right? Well, not any more.
As of April 2019 Liquidware offers a fully configured, tested, and isolated hosted PoC environment all good to go. And I think that’s just great. Throughout the last 18 months I’ve set up and configured multiple Liquidware PoC’s. The reasons for this varied, though back than it was also still part of my day job. Of course, I also wanted to learn more and dig in a bit deeper on a personal level. In fact, at a certain point I literally brought my home lab into the office so that I could make the most out of the time I had available during the week – yes, I could have remoted in, but I preferred this approach.
Not too big of a deal
Most of the time setting up these PoC’s wasn’t that big of a deal. At one point I remember visiting a customer completely new to Liquidware and we (one of the local admins and myself) had to spin up a small ProfileUnity PoC. I started with a short introduction talk where I showed him a few slides, explained what was taking place under the hood, so to speak, had a brief look at some of the other products we offered, how they interact and amplify each other, and so on, before getting started setting up the environment.
It took us about 25 minutes to get it up an running. Great you say, so why do we need a hosted PoC then? Good question.
More than meets the eye
Well, even though we were good to go within 30 minutes or so, if we take a step back and look at the bigger picture leading up to those 30 minutes, you’ll notice that there’s a bit more to it.
As always, leading up to an appointment I make sure to get in contact early, at least two to three weeks in advance, depending on when the appointment is made, of course. This, to make sure that all perquisites are taken care of, or as much as possible anyway so we don’t run into any ‘surprises’ when setting up the PoC. Installing the software is easy enough, unfortunately, the environments that the software needs to ‘land’ in are often overly complex.
Getting an account with proper permissions/rights can be a hassle alone. Besides that, we’ll need at least a couple of machines/VM’s for testing purposes, properly sized, a few accounts to throw around, GPO’s that potentially need re-configuring, and from a networking perspective some things need to be taken care of as well. Sometimes there might even be solutions in place serving a similar purpose, and I could go on.
My point is, while installing and setting up the PoC software is supposed to be the easy part, it can be made complicated by variables (often) out of your control. Not a bad thing, per se, but it’s definitely something you’ll need to take into consideration, inventory, plan, and take care of, preferably before getting to work. If not, you’ll probably run into (unforeseen) issues which will take you even more time to figure out.
Even when it seems nothing will, or can go wrong because you simple checked all the boxes, it sometimes still does. IT works in mysterious ways, as most of you have experienced firsthand on multiple occasions, I’m sure.
Three days, and that’s fast!
The above PoC example took almost three days in total. And that’s because everything fell into place rather quickly, with budgets being pre-approved and all. That’s my time and efforts, but more importantly, those of the customer as well. He, the IT admin, was a busy man (aren’t we all?) and while all he wanted was to simply explore what ProfileUnity brings to the table, now he had to take care of a bunch of other ‘stuff’ first. Effective? Eventually, yes. Efficient? Definitely not.
Go here to find out more about their solutions FlexApp, ProfileUnity, and Strausphere UX
With the Liquidware Hosted POC service you will instantly bypass all of these headaches that come with setting up an a relatively simple environment just to test out some, or all of their products. Fast-track through a POC with these advantages:
- Site is fully configured, tested, isolated and available today – no waiting.
- You can utilize all configurations and learnings in your on-site POC, reducing the time it takes to get through this stage in your own environment.
- Liquidware Hosted POC is FREE to serious evaluators who want to get hands-on with our products to understand their value.
- You can fully test out the entire rich, advanced feature sets in our solutions to get the full impact of how they can advance your desktop environments.
- Get expert guidance as you move through the POC – your questions can be answered on the spot by knowledgeable Liquidware staff.
- You start the Hosted POC on day 1 with no special tools or other software needed.
- Easily test out how our solutions “play” with other solutions or platforms you have already installed – or plan to install.
Support
Like mentioned above, getting a PoC up and running as a Service, because that’s basically what it is, is easy peasy, but what about support? I mean, what if something doesn’t work the way you expect, or it does but you have questions about some of the products? Well, no worries, Liquidware will gladly help you with that as well. Just have a quick glance at bullet Nr. 5 where it states ‘Get expert guidance as you move through the POC – your questions can be answered on the spot by knowledgeable Liquidware staff.”
If only they could have come up with all this about 18 months earlier :-)
If you are interested in learning more, you can contact [email protected] to see if your organisation qualifies.
