Of course, you can’t have a training session without instructors. They’re responsible for driving the learning agenda as well as providing the necessary support for participants. As usual, we have our very own Support team to count on. They have assigned a diverse team of experts to cover our product family over the training sessions. And to do this while still providing world-class support to our customers is a feat in itself.
Just as teachers need to prepare their curriculum, our Support team must prepare their instructions. And practice runs are just what the doctor ordered. A few weeks prior to ICE, we held practice Boot Camp sessions using staff participants of varying proficiencies. From these runs, the instructors were able to tweak and change their sessions as necessary, with the goal of providing a smooth learning experience.
The idea behind the Boot Camp is to provide a strong, hands-on training session for participants. Having actual devices to work with provides that hands-on element. Although we keep a wide range of devices on hand, we simply don’t have enough of the same device to cater to the large number of participants involved — over 30 participants this year. And so we look for support from hardware vendors. This year, ARRIS has come through by lending and shipping a number of their gateway devices, as well as a CMTS to pull all the devices together.
We also need to run instances of our products for each participant. Rather than lugging down a server, or dedicating the first part of a session to installing and configuring our software, we utilize virtualization back home in Vancouver. This also lets us prepare ahead of time and means that we only have to worry about making sure that the VMs are reachable from the venue. It’s also one less piece of hardware that we need to unpack, set up, and plug in!
These are just the core requirements involved in running the show. We’re confident that the preparations we’ve taken will lead to a strong learning experience for participants in our Boot Camp today. If you are interested in learning more about our Boot Camp, sign up for our newsletter, follow @ICEconference on Twitter or check out incognito.com/ice for details on the next conference.