Why Cloud Software Demands Training as a Service [Video]

When Software as a Service is dynamic and changing, your training needs to be too. To solve this issue, Training as a Service keeps you “matched up” with your always updating software. This means that as your software updates, so does your training.

All aspects of training are done as a service. This includes the updating, maintaining, and delivering of the software. So, basically you don’t have to worry about anything.

Maverick Solutions has built Training as a Service (we call it ENGAGE by Maverick) specifically for ever changing Software as a Service (SaaS) applications (like Oracle Cloud, Workday, Salesforce, etc).

ENGAGE by Maverick, Maverick Solution’s Training as a Service offering, is updated quarterly. It is fully customizable, comprehensive, and available 24/7/365. ENGAGE by Maverick is composed of ENGAGE Learn and ENGAGE Live.

If you want to learn more about our Training as a Service offering, ENGAGE by Maverick, speak with one of our training experts today!

Read the interview here:

Fred Von Canon 

“My name is Fred Von Canon, I am the founder and owner of Maverick solutions, founded Maverick in 1999, after having worked for Oracle University for a couple of years, I’ve been doing Oracle training and only Oracle training for a while it’s our 22nd year. “

 Question: What issues arise with SaaS? What is Training as a Service? 

 Fred Von Canon 

“Software as a Service is certainly a completely different paradigm for how software is delivered than on premise where you would own the software and you had to install it and keep it up to date. And there’s a lot of cost to that, including a lot of headcount that if you do your Software as a Service, cloud based software, you pay a more known amount. But what that does for the training if you continue to do training, the old way, there’s an impedance mismatch. You have software that’s dynamic and continues to get updated, and practically constantly hundreds of changes that come each quarter, you can’t have static training, you have to sustain the training, and it has to keep up with the updates. We’ve tried to make ourselves think Training as a Service, what does that look like? Well, it would have the same types of characteristics that the Software as a Service would, where you’re really just using the training, you don’t own it, per se, you’re licensing it, you don’t have to have all the training people to deliver to build it to configure to deliver it, to maintain it, that’s all done as a service. And that’s kind of how we’re starting to think about training, and really helping our implementation partners and our clients think about training in a different way, think about it as a service, because it really needs to be that way if it’s going to match up with Software as a Service. “

Question:  What impact does Training as a Service have on the wholistic business? 

 Fred Von Canon 

“We realized pretty quickly that there was a mismatch between Software as a Service being done dynamically with hundreds of updates constantly happening to the training that we used to do, which was pretty much single point in time training. And that didn’t match up. But we’ve put a lot of resources, time, effort, and money into building out a subscription based service that is a library of customizable content that that you can subscribe to. And that checks the box for an “as a service”. So it keeps the training up to date, we develop it, we customize it for each client, and then we keep it up to date for them. So it is truly a service that goes along with the software.

So as we’re talking about training as a service, it’s probably important to identify what the pieces of that are – in our mind – have a full offering. So we have our engage offering, which is a library of 1000s of simulations, 1000s of pages of content, user guides, job aids, all this created for a generic Oracle implementation. And so all of that can be customized to be client specific. So our content for one client would look completely different than another because it is their content we can do single tenant training content for ENGAGE.

But the other big component of our Training as a Service offering is what’s generic, called Performance Support, or Digital Adoption. We have that digital adoption piece that is really in-app live at a time of need help. It’s called performance support, because it’s really intended to kind of take that first level of support from your help desk. If most people are making the same mistake at the same point, then you can just put a little pop up box there, “hey, by the way, use this, don’t use that”, that kind of thing. So, it’s very helpful to alleviate some of those first line support tickets. You can do little pop up messages. It’s great for onboarding. So if you put the digital adoption piece, the performance support piece with ENGAGE we think that makes a great offering.

Along with that when we talk about Training as a Service, it has those two pieces, but it also has the human component to it as well. So you’ll have people, training specialists again, a project manager customer success manager and a learning consultant to help in all phases of the of the content development to keep it maintained, and to say, “hey, maybe we don’t need this one as much”. We can work with you the whole time through the process.

If you put all those together, that really makes what we call Training as a Service, that’s our offering. I think the impact that Training as a Service can have is, the biggest one is ROI. So when clients buy cloud software, from Oracle, for instance, they’re buying the use case of ROI, that overall this is going to save you dollars, if they know that if there’s not user adoption, that’s the biggest reason that that big projects fail user adoption, and getting the buy in that change management and training piece is so huge to get your employees to actually use the software, if they don’t, you can have a great solution and spend 10s of millions of dollars doing it. But if they don’t buy in, you just wasted all that time and money.

We knew years ago that we needed to do a Training as a Service solution here. And there’s a lot of our competitors are still offering training the old way, if you will, static training, single point in time go to lifetime training, we put the investment in there were ahead of the curve. We’ve got a lot of implementation partners that realize that we’re ahead of them, and they don’t really want to make that investment. So they’re partnering with us on the training which is great. “

 Question:  Where does Maverick fit into the corporate learning industry?  

Fred Von Canon 

“You know, our competitor, the vendor really is just selling a platform, and not really the rest of the pieces. So I think we’re in good shape there as far as having a good competitive advantage. So we like where we are in the market, we are always trying to be innovative and look over the horizon around the corner and try to figure out what we need to do next. We knew early on that was what we now call ENGAGE this subscribe content of customizable content, and we’ve jumped on the digital adoption. And that’s certainly where the industry is going not as a replacement for training but as an augmentation and we see them as complimentary. But it’s certainly there and we’re you know, we’re innovating there, we’re looking to find new partners and and how to make that experience better for our customers. “

 Question:  When should clients come to Maverick Solutions for Training?

 Fred Von Canon 

“Clients come to us at different times. While we would prefer they would all come to us on day one, when they start to make this journey to Oracle Cloud. The reality is, we have people that we’ve worked with for a year, during RFP or pre RFP where they know they’re going to Oracle Cloud. And so we’re talking to them and helping them understand what the challenges are. And really in some cases, helping them put together their RFP to make sure that they’re asking the right questions.

I’ve handled three calls in the last week where clients are going live later this month or early next month. And they’re like, Oh, yeah, we forgot either about training, how we’re going to do this, or, we really didn’t think about how we were going to sustain that training. And then there are some where they’ve been live maybe a couple months, and they didn’t realize what the pain and suffering was going to be. And that’s when they call us. And that’s okay, because we can spin this up pretty quick, they can get licensed to ENGAGE like today, as soon as they sign the contract, they can have access to it, and we can customize it in just a few weeks.

We can come in at any time in the implementation. And we have and we’re good with any of them. But we’d prefer you talk to us early on so that we can kind of go that journey with you. If you are looking at moving to Oracle Cloud or you already own Oracle Cloud. We’d love to talk to you about doing training as a service. So training, performance support digital adoption, the whole offering that we have we feel very strongly it’s a better value in a better solution than what’s available on the market. We’d love to love to talk to you if you’re in the market for Oracle Cloud training, please let us know. “