CloudShare releases tool for easy VAR demos of complex IT environments 17 February, 2010 By Mark Cox

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CloudShare is a three year old start-up which launched its' first product, CloudShare, the enterprise version of this new product, almost a year ago. They quickly landed VMware, Cisco, SAP, Websense and other clients, despite basically having no marketing effort at the time. These vendors use the tool for sales demos by their software sales engineers, as well as for training and other related uses. CloudShare Pro was developed to provide the same capacity to VARs and other smaller businesses who sell complex IT solutions and services.

"We recognized the enterprise product used by the vendors is a little too much for the channel, so we designed CloudShare Pro to make it accessible to them," said Kevin Epstein, CloudShare's VP of marketing. "It has the same back-end technology as the enterprise product, but is designed for the single user up. And it will substantially reduce their cost of sale."

CloudShare Pro lets any business user instantly create, share, and track multiple copies of complex IT environments online, replacing the need to ship machines or travel to end-user sites. Customers can deploy multiple copies of pre-configured complex and fully-licensed IT environments in minutes, not days or weeks. It goes far beyond basic webinar or virtual lab offerings however, as it lets users share, interact and collaborate in complete, dedicated hands-on enterprise IT environments, for any length of time.

"The product lets high tech sales people log into a dashboard and instantly hand the customer a whole data center they can uplink, to get the same experience they would have if they were running it in their own data center," Epstein said. "Before, a VAR would have to build their own demo lab, or send out a sales engineer to each customer, install physical machines, and then install software."

The result is significant savings of time and money by eliminating the need to travel and ship to end-user sites, while also gaining more visibility into the entire process by knowing who is using what, when and for how long. The company says that its' enterprise customers using the CloudShare product have seen sales cycles accelerated by months and costs reduced by 30-50 percent. The dedicated analytics dashboard also provides increased visibility into what their sales engineers are doing and how much their partners are selling.

Epstein said CloudShare Pro is not intended to replace on-site test installations and their powerful connection to sales, but is designed to save time and money earlier than that in the sales cycle.

"It's an acceleration," he said. "How many sales call does a sales engineer make before they think a customer is qualified enough to do an onsite install? Instead of working 10 customers at a time, they can now work 50-60 customers. This leverages the time of sales people much earlier in the sales cycle, and ensures that the onsite installs take a lot less time to get to."

CloudShare has channel programs for resellers who want to resell the product and for those who just want to use it themselves and make occasional sales or referrals to customers.

"We have and will continue to have opportunities for resellers to resell our product," Epstein said. "And for resellers who just want to use it as a tool, we have built a 'channel relationship lite' through our affiliate program. If you refer people who wind up signing up, we reward you. The channel has relationships with customers and will reward them when they use that value to our benefit."

A trial version of CloudShare Pro is available today at http://www.cloudshare.com/pro