Accelerating Sales CyclesThrough Demo and PoCLab Automation

WH

ITE PAPER

5/2013

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Technology equipment manufacturers, converged infrastructure solution providers, systems integrators, resellers and distributors face ongoing challenges in optimizing their sales process due to the high capital and time cost of delivering contextualized product demonstrations and proof of concept tests for prospective customers. Many equipment vendors have turned to centralized demonstration and Proof of Concept (PoC) labs to centralize and gain control over these sales processes and accelerate the sales cycle. However, the lack of automation in these demo and PoC lab environments presents a signi�cant barrier to achieving sales velocity. The manual nature of operational processes in typical test labs means that it takes far longer than necessary to setup and execute test and demo topologies. This ine�ciency causes severe under-utilization of costly test lab assets and slows the sales cycle. By implementing test lab automation software, organizations can much more e�ectively manage, control, design, schedule, and report on costly lab assets, resulting in a much higher rate of demos and PoCs. The result is accelerated sales cycles, higher revenue attainment, lower test lab CAPEX and OPEX, higher productivity and margins, and stronger business competitiveness and di�erentiation.

ine�ciency in the lab causes severe under-utilization of costly test lab assets and slows the sales cycle

Introduction

The Demo and PoC ChallengeIT organizations today employ a “trust yet verify” attitude towards integrating new technology into their mission-critical IT infrastructure environments. This means that prospective technology adopters typically insist on seeing technology demonstrations and running proof of concept (PoC) tests when evaluating networking, computing, storage and other equipment solutions. The challenge for technology equipment vendors is the high cost of capital and time needed to execute these necessary sales processes. Credible demonstrations must show the applicability of the vendor’s products to the prospect’s vertical industry in representative use cases. PoCs must meet a much higher standard, since they need to showcase successful performance in a heterogeneous and multi-vendor environment, interoperating with the hardware models, modules and OS/software versions present in the customer network or data center.

Arranging demo’s and PoCs on the customer site carries many risks due to potential unavailability of space, power, cooling, maintenance windows, or personnel time on the part of the prospective customer. In addition, equipment that circulates in the �eld tends to be ine�ciently utilized, with 35% or more of �eld PoC equipment wasted or unproductive for the following reasons:

Time spent in supply chain logistics cycles

Time spent waiting for customers to ready their environments for testing

Damaged and lost equipment resulting in signi�cant write-downs

Use of PoC equipment as long-term loaners to solve technical support issues

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Space

Power

Cooling

Maintenance

Time

Customer demo's and PoCs face risks when the customer can't provide sufficient:

Accelerating Sales Cycles Through Demo and PoC Lab Automation

Lack of Automation ImpedesSales Lab E�ectiveness

Even when lab asset resources are tracked in inventory systems, these systems are primarily for the purposes of managing �nancial asset write-downs, and don’t provide any use to engineers since the inventory cannot be linked e�ectively to the functional use of the equipment. In many cases, the actual tracking the deployment of equipment for the purpose of assembling demo’s and PoCs is done manually on Excel spreadsheets.

The work of connecting equipment into demo or PoC topologies is usually a highly manual process. Engineers design test topologies o�ine using Visio, then hunt through racks of equipment and manually cable the components together. This process can take from hours to days, based on the size and complexity of the test topology.

Once physically con�gured, far more time is consumed con�guring and provisioning the equipment to the right OS or �rmware version, and to create the proper logical components and connectivity, such as building virtual machines (VMs), creating switched or routed connections across Ethernet or Fiber Channel (FC) fabrics or even wide area networking (WAN) IP routing protocol peerings such as OSPF, IS-IS, EIGRP or BGP.

Due to the heavy amount of physical and logical setup time consumed before assembling a demo or PoC, and the lack of ability to save and restore these time-consuming topologies, engineers are reluctant to release equipment once it is con�gured, even if the need for the demo has been delayed. The result is that costly equipment is dramatically underutilized in many test lab environments. It is common in such lab environments for device utilization to be as low as 20%.

Low device utilization creates an unnecessarily high CAPEX and related space and power OPEX burden for equipment vendors, but also impedes sales cycles by tying up resources that could otherwise be deployed more e�ectively. The impact is a thinner pipeline of sales opportunities advancing towards.

Once a demo or PoC lab is built, the sheer size, number of assets, complexity of demo and PoC test topologies, and the need to dynamically change these topologies and equipment to �t customer requirements presents its own signi�cant barrier to e�cient sales operations. A number of such challenges arise from a lack of automation of lab operations:

Realizing the level of waste and ine�ciency in �eld PoC equipment practices, many organizations are choosing to slow or reduce investment in �eld PoC equipment and o�set that by building large-scale test lab facilities in their place. These lab environments, sometimes known as demo labs, PoC labs, executive brie�ng centers and technology interface centers, provide a more seamless way to accomplish these important customer engagements. It is not uncommon for there to be literally millions to tens of millions of dollars of capital invested in large, customer-facing test labs. Technology equipment vendors count on these labs to provide a strong ROI by accelerating sales cycles and reducing equipment waste.

Limited tracking of equipment use

Manual equipment con�guration

Time consuming provisioning

Idle equipment- low utilization

Sales Lab Efficiency Impeded by:

li Accelerating Sales Cycles Through Demo and PoC Lab Automation

Automation is the AnswerLab AutomationMeans:

A lab automation system can radically change this picture. Automation software provides lab organizations the ability to:

Manage lab inventory including physical DUT and testing equipment, L1 switches, and virtual resources such as virtual machines and switches in a live, searchable database. All assets can be tagged with testing attributes for easy searching, eliminating manual hunting for equipment in racks and allowing engineers to interface with the lab e�ciently via software. Complete visibility to lab inventory helps control capital costs by ensuring that devices are maximally utilized.

Create test topologies via a software GUI that is integrated with the live inventory system. The static topology diagram is replaced with an interactive workspace that enables the user to easily modify, update and edit the topology directly from the computer screen (drag and drop devices, draw required connections between them, directly provision devices and more).

Schedule resources and entire test topologies to ensure availability of resources and prevent con�icts or costly test disruption due to human error.

Automated device provisioning to dramatically cut down on test setup time and signi�cantly increase the utilization of costly lab assets.

Facilitate sharing of the lab by geographically distributed personnel through the creation of testing service catalogues that address common customer use cases.

Roll out full test automation, including integration of existing automation scripts rather than requiring all automation to be recreated.

Leverage test automation scripts within a non-programmer friendly GUI so that automation work�ows can be created easily, allowing manual testers to boost their test automation e�ciency.

Strong reporting capabilities so that lab managers can track device utilization rates to ensure proper return on capital, and so that the results of PoC tests can be presented in an intuitive way to prospective customers.

Inventoryvisible, searchable

Test Topology Designdrag and drop GUI

Resource Schedulinghigh utilization

Resource Sharingno test breaks

Provisioninglaunched from topology UI

Test Designnon-programmer friendly

Analysisreal-time dashboards

li Accelerating Sales Cycles Through Demo and PoC Lab Automation

Accelerating the Sales Cycle

Adoption and deployment of lab automation systems in demo and PoC labs leads to signi�cant, positive top and bottom-line impacts for technology vendors:

A dramatic increase in the velocity of demo and PoC delivery. One such lab organization reported that after automating their demo lab, they were able to increase demo delivery from 37 demos per month to over 700 demos per month within the space of two years—a nearly 1800% increase. Greater demo velocity leads to a wide and shorter sales pipeline and rising top-line revenues.

Signi�cant savings in lab CAPEX and OPEX. Organizations deploying lab automation software report increases of 50% to 200% in device utilization, leading to capital budget savings as well as accompanying savings in space, power, and cooling costs. In some cases, these cost savings are dwarfed by the prevention of serious business disruption caused by unchecked equipment growth, when there is literally no further real estate or power available on a campus to grow labs. By increasing device utilization, labs not only save on the bottom line, but ensure that they don’t become the bottleneck for corporate top-line growth.

Increased competitiveness. Just as re-engineering and automating front o�ce business processes leads to greater business agility, responsiveness to customers and ability to execute, automation in this critical aspect of technology equipment sales cycles provides a tangible competitive advantage that manifests itself in customer satisfaction, employee productivity, return on capital, and positive brand e�ects.

Lab automation is a logical evolution of the drive to gain greater e�ciency, velocity and volume in technology sales operations. Organizations that invest in test and lab automation software can gain signi�cant business advantages, while those that maintain antiquated operational processes in their demo and PoC lab operations risk squandering a major top and bottom-line business opportunity.

Conclusion

To learn more from the global leader in test and lab automation solutions, please visit :www.qualisystems.com

20%Level of device utilization reported by organizations before lab automation software is deployed

35%Percentage of �eld demo and PoC equipment that is lost, broken, or held captive by non-sales processes

1800%The increase in demos delivered per month at one organization after implementing demo lab automation

50% to 200%Device utilization increase reported by organizations using lab automation software

li Accelerating Sales Cycles Through Demo and PoC Lab Automation