Today's training departments are expected to deliver an increasing volume of classes, while controlling costs and IT support requirements. This places immense pressure on conventional training infrastructures as they are often time consuming to provision, and their network requirements consume bandwidth quickly. The limitations of these physical and online-classroom delivery models have created an immediate need for solutions that deliver fast, easy, and secure virtual training on a global scale.

For example, using Skytap's virtual training solution, GE Healthcare has raised the bar in the effectiveness of its training "a hundred fold" in their words. Previously, training within the U.S. and Canada required expensive travel. With Skytap, the company can bring its training straight to employees living almost anywhere with a global reach expanding as far as Kenya.

"In the past, I had to bring someone into the training center at headquarters so they could access hands-on environments," said Doug McKelvey, Training and Organizational Readiness manager at GE Healthcare IT. "Leveraging Skytap, we're actually able to give that student, in their home location, the ability to actually do the hands-on training. When you're dealing with technology, hands-on is the only way people learn."

Using Skytap's self-service web UI, trainers can provision new classrooms in seconds to provide a hands-on learning environment anywhere in the world, including self-paced course delivery that students can schedule around their own availability. Skytap's virtual training solution also allows training organizations to take their existing instructor-led and remote training environments to the cloud without any application rewrites.

"Skytap is a very scalable solution, and you can replicate environments in a matter of minutes," said Alex Gurevich, senior manager of global education services at Informatica. "The most important thing is that we can integrate with our learning-management system and fire off labs that are available to students within two to three minutes from the point of registration."

According to Andrew Garbutt, an instructional designer at Schneider Electric, the use of Skytap has allowed his team to triple its training base, while relying on the same number of trainers or fewer. "Skytap helps us very quickly deploy training resources, so we can dive right into providing the software training people expect from us," said Garbutt. "With Skytap, we're now able to reach three times as many students."