Simplifying Complex Software Demos

[Ethan Yell]

Our company is in policy and risk management. Elemental Security Platform (ESP) unifies security controls and activity of the network environment. A full ESP implementation requires a complex server environment including hardware, Red Hat Linux and an Oracle database. This complex implementation makes it difficult for our sales team to quickly and easily demonstrate the company’s solution on-site.

As a result, sales demos are restricted to remote demos over a VPN connection. They have to spend up to two days at the customer’s site to implement a full solution demo.

We require a solution with the help of which our sales team and customers can interact with at a customer site and that too without a complex server and database implementation.

Any help in this regard would be highly appreciated.
Thanks.

[Matti_Kurkela]

How about setting up VMware on a powerful laptop, using it to run several virtual machines, and having a pre-installed demo environment on those virtual machines? When the demo is done, just shutdown the VMs and use the laptop as normal.

If your sales team is comfortable with using Linux on their laptops, you might use the free Xen instead of the commercial VMware.

If you need a more complex demo environment, get several laptops, each hosting as many virtual hosts as convenient. You'll then need to carry a network switch too.

With a few laptops full of VMs and a network switch, you can pack quite a complex setup into a single suitcase for transport.

If something is preventing you from doing this, what is it?

MK

[Daiv Batista]

Without further details it is difficult even to draft a possible solution that would suit to your needs. The VPN can be implemented using different software/hardware vendors and everyone has its quirks, which means inter-operability might be extremely difficult. So, my point is that you need to provide more information in order to get some ideas.

[Alan_152]

I had a similar problem about 10 years ago. What I did was, instead of shipping all the bits over a VPN, was to set up a MS Netmeeting Conferencing Server and demonstrate the product that way.

That eliminated the need to do a complex setup every time a potential client wanted to see the product; instead we did 1 setup in our sales room, publish it to the Conferencing Server, and ensure that the client had a copy of Netmeeting handy.

[Ethan Yell]

As I have mentioned earlier, ESP unifies security controls. They deliver persistent visibility into the current state, security posture, and activity of the network environment. This enables organization to express, implement, and remediate, easily and cost-effectively, a broad spectrum of security policies to address security requirements, regulatory compliance and business risk.

This would require complex server environment, of course. But we need solution that is not at all complex and can solve the issues.

[Royal Hem]

The intention is to eliminate the need for the VPN and be able to run a "live" demo at the clients' site using one or more virtual machines/appliances.

Did I understand correctly?

[Daiv Batista]

You can configure Virtual Machine to run ESP, built with Red Hat Linux and an Oracle Database. Everything required for the ESP demo â the operating system, database and Elemental code - are contained within the virtual machine and could be carried on convenient portable storage media like USB memory sticks.

[Ethan Yell]

That is fine, but also suggest any such vendor that is providing such similar offerings. The presence of large number of vendors in the market today makes it difficult to choose the correct one that meets the requirements as well as cost effective too.