There is a lot of debate internally and with customers as to the best technology to use to host software demos. Most companies have switched to a Virtual Machine system for internal demos as they are easy to carry around on laptops and simple to reset and update. VMware still seems to be the most popular with their Workstation product or in some cases the free player. We are seeing more customers using Microsoft Virtual PC. These demos work well until you want to let the prospect use the demo themselves, then you have to mail DVDs or USB hard drives with the virtual machines or they have to download gigabytes of Virtual Machine – not to mention the grey areas around licensing of operating systems for demo use in Virtual Machines.
Online Demos
Online demos are the solution that most ISVs are looking at or already use whether an internally built system or one hosted by Runaware.
There are two main ways to deliver these hosted systems; the first is really a hosted extension of the Virtual Machines carried on laptops that I talked about above, the second is to host the applications in a Citrix XenApp / Microsoft Terminal Server Environment.
Virtual Machine Hosted Demos
Virtual Machines, hosted on servers, using the server versions of the virtualization software (Hyper-V from Microsoft , ESX or Virtual Server from VMware and XenServer from Citrix) is the quickest and easiest way to do it.
These virtualization technologies all make it easy to put a demo up on your servers, connection into the demo can be with one of a few screen scraping technologies and data reset is as simple as reverting back to an instance / snapshot of the virtual machine. Obviously it gets more complicated if you want to add lead capture, tutorials, sample data provisioning and have multiple virtual machines the user needs to interact with, but a really straight forward demo isn’t too difficult.
The fun starts though when you want to get users to go through the process of registering, convincing them to install a plug-in and getting the performance of the system up to scratch over the internet (no small task). Drop off rates at each of these stages can be scary and have a negative effect overall – it’s possible a bad or badly setup demo could be worse than none at all and this is the area that most of our customers who have tried to do this in house of struggled with.
Citrix XenApp / Microsoft Terminal Server
This is our preferred core technology. For customers who don’t need to give users administrative level access or whose applications don’t give access to system level services (network and system management applications and security software often fall in these categories), this is the solution we use. There is a lot more work involved in configuring the environment as the reset isn’t as simple as reverting to a saves state in a virtual machine, but with the tool set we have developed over the last 6 or so years, it’s not as hard as it was.
Installing most applications into a Citrix / Terminal Server environment isn’t that hard, but understanding how the applications work, where they store all their settings and data can be. Once you know where it all goes, there are many challenges to resetting them after each user and to isolating each user so the demo experience is never tainted.
Although the work effort in this platform is much more in setup, the dividends in scalability and performance are significant. Often we can get 10 or 20 times more users on a server than we could if each user had their own virtual machine and the performance is better.
I’ll talk more about the different virtualization technologies and how we handle different challenges some of the more complex applications pose in a later blog…
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