About Cloudera

Cloudera is the leader in Apache Hadoop-based software and services and offers a powerful new data platform that enables enterprises and organizations to look at all their data – structured as well as unstructured – and ask bigger questions for unprecedented insight at the speed of thought. They have customers throughout the financial services, government, telecommunications, media, web, advertising, retail, energy, bioinformatics, pharma/healthcare, university research, oil and gas, and gaming industries.

“Cloudera helps companies solve really big problems,” said Sarah Sproehnle, Vice President, Educational Services at Cloudera. “Whether it’s detecting fraud in financial services or identifying and detecting drug interactions for pharmaceuticals, Cloudera legitimately makes the world a better place.” Their customers, however, are trying to adopt Apache Hadoop, a complex platform that when used correctly can provide new business insights. It’s essential that Cloudera gives its customers the skills and expertise they need to be successful.

How TrainingRocket helped grow Cloudera's training business:

The Challenges of Growing a Training Business

“We needed to go beyond simply managing our classes,” Sproehnle said. ”Over the last two years, the education team had taught 15,000 people, including employees at half of the Fortune 100 – we needed to start making the classes work for us.” Cloudera had been using Eventbrite to schedule classes and manage attendees, but Eventbrite wasn’t meant to do what Cloudera needed to do, which was putting on hundreds of training classes per year for thousands of students. The platform also didn’t offer some of the back-end functionality they needed to run a robust training system.

Improving visibility into the training business was equally important. Cloudera needed a way to easily track the status of each class and to be able to share that information with the sales and marketing teams. They also needed the ability to track the profitability of courses and the multitudes of classes across the globe in order to make better decisions.

Lastly, Cloudera needed to be able to support international customers, which meant supporting multiple language capabilities and accepting payments in multiple currencies.

Cloudera Chooses TrainingRocket

Cloudera chose TrainingRocket, a cloud-based learning platform for managing instructor-led, on-premise training courses, to create Cloudera University, its online training hub. TrainingRocket handled the complexities associated with marketing, selling, managing, delivering and tracking the performance of Cloudera’s training courses. TrainingRocket ensured that every detail of Cloudera’s training programs was handled efficiently and effectively, in a single integrated and hosted platform. It allowed the training department to very easily edit course details or add new classes to the schedule. It also made it easier for students to find the information they were looking for within Cloudera University.

TrainingRocket also provided valuable training intelligence including a dashboard that shows current sales pipeline and conversion ratios, and reports that address all of the key operational aspects of the business including course, class and trainer performance as well as customer satisfaction.

The Business Impact

“Our relationship with ServiceRocket feels more like a partnership,” said Sarah Sproehnle, Vice President, Educational Services at Cloudera. “They want to hear our ideas and our needs and they really want to build that into our roadmap, which is really important to us because I want to know that I have a vendor that’s with me for the long run.”

Using TrainingRocket, Cloudera was able to satisfy all of their training needs in a single solution. The efficiency of TrainingRocket means that the training team can be highly effective while remaining a lean organization. It also means their customers have a centralized hub to learn about training courses, identify classes that work for their schedule and easily purchase seats.

“One of the first things we did was get all of our public schedule listed so it would show up on the Cloudera University pages hosted by TrainingRocket, and then registrations just started coming in,” Sproehnle said.

“TrainingRocket allows us to do all these amazing things – easily maintain these hundreds of classes and thousands of people come through the system regularly,” Sproehnle said. “We have a pretty small staff, but TrainingRocket helps them keep up with the coordination and the administration work and get all the bang for our buck. It’s been very rewarding to have this program grow so fast. I feel like we’re really bringing a service to our customers and making them successful.”