SimuActive Product Overview

Transcription

1 SimuActive Product Overview SimuActive 1 is a comprehensive solution to deliver state-of-the-art interactive virtual replication of products for lead generation, sales support, demonstration, and training purposes. By creating rich multi-media realistic product simulations combined with realtime online meeting capabilities, SimuActive empowers firms to grow revenue, lower costs and increase productivity of sales and technical personnel while streamlining the entire pre and post-sales process. The Problem The technology marketplace today is characterized with a large number of vendors selling highly complex, feature-rich products. These companies are forced to make large investments in marketing, selling, and educating customers in order to effectively target a market. Product demonstrations or demos have become the backbone of leadgeneration, sales support, business development and user training activities. Today s Solution Companies today have adopted a hybrid approach combining live and static demos to educate the market and train customers and channel partners. Large enterprise deals can justify the time, travel, and personnel costs of conducting a live demo. However, in most situations live demos are cost-prohibitive forcing companies to demonstrate their products using passive screen-captures. Presenting these static linear demos can still cost a firm a considerable sum in online meeting services such as WebEx. Both live demos and online meeting require participants to adhere to a fixed time schedule which can be inconvenient for today s busy executives and even limit their ability to participate. Today s solutions are plagued with many problems: Technically complex feature-rich products can be hard to demonstrate without rich visual aids. The most effective way for an individual to retain a product s key features and benefits is to actually use it. This is not feasible for non-technical or novice audiences. Many products have extensive network and server relationships, which can be a key component of the products value proposition, for example networking and security products. These dynamic relationships cannot be captured in a static environment. Live demonstrations while effective can be extremely expensive to scale to a large number of remote users or customer prospects. Linear, movie-like presentations are ineffective at holding the attention of the viewer and lead to low retention rates of a product s features and benefits. 1 SimuActive is a registered trademark of Simulāt Inc.

2 Companies are forced to incur large online-meeting or travel expenses The Bottom line Technology companies invest a great deal of money in developing the best products in the market. However, current product demonstration and educational tools leave firms poorly equipped to cost-effectively market their products to a large numbers of remote and non-technical users resulting in a lower return on their product investment. The SimuActive Solution SimuActive creates a realistic simulation of any technology product and its operating environment. It combines live product interactivity with the low-cost reach of online browser based accessibility. SimuActive does not ScreenCam your product, it simulates it! By combing advanced application development with world-class creative audio/visual techniques, SimuActive recreates the product and its external network configuration as if the product was live and deployed. SimuActive goes beyond motion-capture by embedding the products logic and external inter-dependencies into the simulation. By providing both an active-guided and hands-on freestyle mode SimuActive engages users leading to more effective product demonstrations and much higher retention rates during training exercises. In Freestyle mode, the user can test out different settings/configurations and see the effect across the entire system instantly. The involvement and understanding provided to the user is almost as real as, and can even be better than working with the physical product. In addition to the core simulation functionality, the SimuActive suite delivers embedded services to facilitate live audio-video communication, document and screen sharing, realtime chat and white boarding, desktop sharing, automated smart support, and enterprise class analysis & reporting, to create the only truly interactive end-to-end product demonstration and training solution. SimuActive helps companies through the entire sales lifecycle from lead generation through product training & support. Lead Generation: Enticing call to action with instant access to play with a realistic simulation of a complex product in guided or free-style mode without the need for a lengthy installation process and configuration with other dependant components. Can trigger live contact at the peak of prospects interest Generate viral marketing Sales presentation: Quickly and efficiently communicate main features, benefits, and value of product Highly engaging to raise audience interest and retention of information. Product demonstrations:

3 Can demonstrate the workings of a product as if it is live and deployed in a complex environment Eliminate the fear of the demo crashing Diminish the need of an SE with the guided tour through complex configurations and testing of products functionality Technical Training and e-learning: SimuActive takes e-learning one step further and allows users to learn-bydoing. Companies can leverage SimuActive s active learning tools to train internal sales and marketing personnel, partners, and end users for a fraction of their current product training costs. Drastically reduce equipment and trainers cost Hands on product as if it is live and deployed in its network environment Product Support: SimuActive can learn from live customer support interactions to automatically build a knowledge base of FAQs. After a short period of time the system is able to answer most product support questions while routing the remainder to the product support organization. The Myth of e-learning The term e-learning today encompasses instructional materials of any kind presented to users online regardless of their inherent effectiveness or value. Just as an ineffective instructor in a classroom does not add value, poorly designed e-learning tools have the same results. The buzz around e-learning has caused many companies to lose sight of this shortcoming. The current e-learning delivery capabilities in the market consist of passive product guides, online quizzes, polls, and grading. The SimuActive Difference - Rather than simply allowing users to observe the product, SimuActive can force users to be hands-on and use the product as if it were actually deployed on their system, leading to a highly engaging and effective e-learning environment. The SimuActive ROI Guarantee Simulāt can guarantee to improve on your current indices or ratios sufficiently to more than get your investment back. SimuActive has a proven and demonstrable ROI in these areas of measurement: Engaging interactive sales presentations: Less time for sales personnel to communicate more effectively Higher conversion rate from leads to prospects More engaging website for longer retention per visit Product Demonstrations: Less Sales Engineers support cost

4 Less equipment and demo failure cost Better lead generation by enticing a download that they can play with instantly without installation Reduced cost of online meeting services Hands-on technical training and e-learning: Higher retention rates through learning-by-doing. Reduced costs of equipment and personnel. Increase number of hands-on trainees Smart Product Support Reduced product support costs by allowing the simulator to answer common support questions via its dynamic knowledge database and then guiding the user through the appropriate scenario. Embedded communication and collaboration functionality Increase the number of prospect contacts by Directly engaging them at peak of interest Increase Customers and trainee case-closed cycle with instant access to live support Increase efficiency for remote meetings and collaborations Save on WebEx type of online meeting services and travel costs SimuActive Technology The SimuActive technology and development methodology is based on our patentpending proprietary toolset that allows our professional services organization to rapidly simulate products of any complexity along with their associated operating and network environment. The SimuActive core platform captures and recreates not only your product s look and feel, but unlike other demonstration tools, also captures the products embedded logic. Users can perform actions within the simulator and see the effects of their actions propagate throughout the product s network and integrated systems. SimuActive is built on top of the Macromedia Flash platform. In addition to leveraging Flash s existing rich multimedia development capabilities, SimuActive pushes the envelope in creating next-generation communication, collaboration, and data-retrieval services. SimuActive delivers: SimTools: For rapid creation of realistic product simulations SimScreens: To replicate the product s look and feel SimLogic: To store and easily edit a product s functionality and dependencies Multiple demonstration modes: Tour guide: Allows users to be guided through a product demonstration with ondemand contextual help.

5 Freestyle mode: Harnesses the power of the simulation by allowing user to safely roam free within the demonstration as if they were actually using the product SimMeeting: A host of communication features to facilitate live interactions during a product demonstration including: Live online audio-video conferencing Real-time document sharing, chat, and white boarding Desktop sharing with remote control capabilities SimSupport: SimuActive can learn from live customer support interactions to automatically build a knowledge base of FAQs. After a short learning period the system is able to answer most product support questions while routing the remainder to the product support organization. SimAnalysis & SimReports: Enterprise class analysis and reporting of a user s clickstream for capturing customer interest information and auditing training programs. At Simulāt we are passionate about providing our clients with: A broad range of expertise: We provide world-class development, creative, and marketing services in-house to provide a single vendor solution for our clients. A new way of thinking about demos: SimuActive does not screen capture your product, it simulates it! A complete solution: Simulation, communication, collaboration, reporting, analysis and support come together to deliver a comprehensive solution. Exactly what they want: Rather than the one size fits all approach of many software vendors, at Simulāt we work with your sales, marketing and product teams to custom develop the most effective, compelling product demonstrations and training programs. Superior Technology: Simulations are created using our proprietary patentpending tool set. Standards Based Applications: The SimuActive suite is built on top of the Macromedia Flash Platform A low-cost easy-to-maintain solution: SimuActive is entirely browser based and leverages Macromedia Flash s 97% penetration rate of internet-enabled desktops and devices. The SimuActive Difference The marriage of advanced application development and world-class multi-media authoring allows firms to leverage the power of rich audio-visual content with enterprise class communications, collaboration and reporting services for a unique end-to-end lead generation, sales support and training solution. We can prove it Top tier companies like Microsoft and Sony use SimuActive to showcase their products and train their sales force, partners and end users.

6 Microsoft ISA 2004 Server Microsoft Corporation chose the SimuActive product suite to educate the market and train its world-wide channel partners for the Microsoft ISA Server 2004 roll-out. The opportunity Microsoft needed to launch the new release of its Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) 2004 server. ISA 2004 is a major release for Microsoft with significant improvement over the previous version. The success of this feature-rich network security product matches Microsoft s concern for security and determination to improve their performance in this segment in the marketplace The problem Microsoft is challenged with educating the market on the various features and benefits of the ISA 2004 server. The company needs a solution to cost-effectively train its worldwide channel partners to sell the product to their customer base. This is complicated by the fact that the core customers for the product are small to medium businesses with IT staffs that are often inexperienced in network security issues. The SimuActive solution Simulāt developed a Simuactive training program for Microsoft replicating the core logic and network configuration of ISA By recreating ISA s connections to external components, a user can see how ISA monitors internal corporate resources through the DMZ as well as branch offices and remote users through the Internet. This virtual environment allows Microsoft to highlight ISA s key features and graphically demonstrate its ability to defend against malicious attacks from the Internet. A user can be actively guided through six different tasks and learn how easy it is to set up a VPN tunnel, securely publish material to the Internet, set up internet access rules for employees and much more. Experienced IT users can switch to free-style mode and navigate the ISA administration console just as if they were using the product and even alter and test various network configuration options. Value to Microsoft Microsoft expects to recover their investment many times over in the first few months alone through significant cost savings on technical sales support expenses and user training time. The simulation also drastically lowers the need for purchasing and transporting physical network and server equipment. The ISA Simuactive Training program is an AWESOME tool. We have already gotten great response to the beta version, and we anticipate its usefulness to allow the market to learn our highly technical and sophisticated product Joseph Landes, Senior Product Manager

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