Faced with an LMS that was deprecating its services, Exterro needed a new learning solution that could deliver on three promises:

• securely and seamlessly transition 45,000 learners in 90 days with no downtime or interruptions in service
• support the growth and unique needs of their partner community
• provide the partnership and functionality to create an experience that reflects their brand values while taking their learning business to new heights

With a looming deadline to transition from their old LMS to Thought Industries, Exterro faced the daunting task of getting their new site live in 90 days. To make things even more challenging, Exterro's business has unique needs for data security and uptime.

"The Exterro platform is very robust, it's very reliable, and it's something that is used on a minute-by-minute basis by our customers," said Exterro's Vice President of Global Training, Sarah Hargreaves. "We could not disrupt the learning of our students, putting them on pause while we went through a migration journey. That was a really critical thing for us. We didn't want any downtime at all."

The Exterro team needed to know that Thought Industries would take their onboarding process as seriously as Exterro treats its own customers. Data risk management is not just something that Exterro delivers to its customers. It's a requirement in everything that they do. With the types of clients they have, there needs to be complete trust in their uptime and data security management.

After rigorous planning and attention to detail through the onboarding process, the team met its goal to be live in 90 days. According to Ms. Hargeaves, "The onboarding process definitely met our expectations. It was just a really nice and supportive experience."

Migrating 5000 learners with critical uptime requirements can be a daunting task, but the Exterro team found a partner in Thought Industries, who was willing to lean in and ensure expectations were met at each stage of the onboarding process.

"We had a huge number of learners … moving anything of that size, it's going to take some planning," said Ms. Hargreaves. "Things can be very fast paced with so many SaaS-based solutions to support … there are a lot of moving parts for a lot of people. And those considerations were baked into how we wanted to manage this project."

With such a high volume of learners and sensitive data to consider, change management was top of mind for both teams. "To embark on a significant migration journey and move onto a new platform with great UX and UI, we needed to be sure that all the people involved were confident that nothing would go wrong," said Ms. Hargreaves.

At the beginning of the project, the Exterro team was admittedly nervous, as they wanted to be sure the project would unfold as expected. They did significant planning and held regular reviews as they moved through the project. At each step, they stopped to look at how the process was working. They conducted impact analysis as they progressed, as they were constantly thinking about different scenarios that were presented to them.

The Thought Industries project manager that was assigned to Exterro invested time in understanding their needs and listening to the ideas and concerns about the project's impact on their learners and their business. In the process, it became a relationship built on trust.

As a global business, Exterro supports an extensive channel community. Making sure those partners can deliver the same level of services that Exterro provides its own frontline customers is critical to their success.

Thought Industries gives Exterro the ability to create unique learning experiences for their staff, customers, and channel partners using Ti's multi-tenancy solution, Panorama. Each of these audiences can use their personalized learner dashboards to "choose their own adventure" and decide what training they need in the moment.

Sarah Hargreaves, Vice President, Global Training, Exterro, commented, "The thing that really sets Thought Industries apart from the competition is Panorama. Panorama has just blown us away with its opportunities."

When new channel partners are invited into the Exterro Academy, they enter via a partner portal, a place that has been designed for their experience. The content presented on these sites is branded by Exterro and designed exclusively for the use of certain learners.