Virtual Labs: Working Together
December 15, 2006
By Margery Weinstein
Not all virtual labs were created equal, or, rather, they're not all virtually the same. That's the take of Erik Josowitz, vice president of marketing for Austin, Texas-based Surgient, a provider of enterprise applications based on virtualization that's used to facilitating live virtual training.
Take WebEx Communications, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based company that also specializes in virtualization for the purposes of online conferencing and training. Rather than perceiving it as a market rival, Josowitz says WebEx's offering is distinct enough from Surgient's to make it a partner instead. He says customers sometimes opt to use the two technologies in concert. One such customer is the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA). The association has combined the technologies of both—WebEx to unite, Surgient to individualize—to make sure newly graduated medical and health professional students fully understand the use of the technology in hospitals.
AHIMA uses Surgient to power its virtual lab program. The Chicago-based organization uses Web conferencing systems to allow instructors to show students what to do, "but part of the instruction needs to be students getting hands-on time with these complex technologies, and the ability to try and fail as they master skills with this new software," Josowitz stresses.
That?s where the WebEx Training Center comes in. The Training Center contains a technology that allows course creators to deploy one application to multiple students so each learner is able to manipulate the software from his or her own computer, but with a shared cursor.
Surgient?s solution, meanwhile, "gives each student his own, complete software environment," he points out. "What that enables them to do is work at their own pace throughout the class without being interrupted by other students, and ultimately certify their proficiency in these software applications.
"The distinction is ours is a one-to-one application," he says, "where something like WebEx is a one-to-many application."
Training Center has a mode in which it can be turned to whereby if you have one computer set up already for each student, and the application he is using can fit on each computer, then each can work off his own desktop virtually instead of sharing a cursor, he notes, but the catch is the application has to be small enough to fit on each of those desktops. In the case of AHIMA, that isn't possible. The medical software applications, such as patient information systems, are simply too large for that. What's more, that kind of complex software requires set-up and configuration before the training labs can be put in place, which Training Center doesn't provide, Josowitz says.
Surgient picks up where Training Center leaves off in IT capacity, which is why the partnership, which allows the two companies to launch joint marketing and selling activities, makes sense. "We have some customers who use our solutions together where our system is responsible for setting up and configuring the individual lab environments for each of the students," he explains, "and then Training Center is responsible for delivering that to the student desktop."
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