About Aptum Technologies
Aptum Technologies offers its customers true hybrid data infrastructure solutions through data center, cloud,
hosting, connectivity technologies, and managed services across North and Central America, Europe, the Middle
East and Africa. With its 20-year heritage, Aptum provides technical expertise from consultation and architecture
to ongoing solution management and optimization.
The Challenge
Andy Narain is the Technical Support Manager – DBA and Professional Services. He is tasked with looking for
training and career development opportunities to enhance the customer experience, sales, and internal database
teams at Aptum. Andy is a huge advocate of training and is passionate about recruiting more employees to get
trained and certified.
The IT industry, especially cloud hosting, is ever evolving. Within the last five years, public cloud hosting through
providers such as Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon AWS has grown tremendously.
Customers are increasingly moving to these larger providers, where they can scale easily and not have to worry
about local data centers going down. To get their members up to speed, the New Horizons training solutions team
chose applicable courses from the vast New Horizons learning portfolio.
“One of the biggest businesses right now is that most customers are looking at public cloud offerings and are
needing people to help them migrate to those infrastructures,” says Andy. “Something that we've been doing
internally is training up our teams on all these products and the migration process. We help customers migrate to
the public cloud, then they partner with us for support.”
Training is a critical aspect in making sure the customer experience and professional services departments
provide Aptum’s customers with top-notch support, a key business driver for improving Customer Lifetime Value
(CLV).
The Solution
Fortunately, Andy’s proactive perspective on training is setting his team up for long-term success. “If we’re going
to launch a product, then there should be training before we even start selling to a customer. For example, you
don't wait until after you sell the car to then hire mechanics. You need mechanics on hand and ready, so that the
moment that person drives off the lot, they can drive right back in and somebody can help them. That’s why we
can't wait until the week after a launch to have our people learn the product.”
New Horizons is helping Aptum meet these training needs, while staying abreast of the hosting market. But what
Andy finds most helpful about working with New Horizons is their ability to keep up with the numerous software
changes. “The New Horizons team has been really good about updating the training material because one
week, it may be one GUI on Microsoft’s portal, and then the next week, it's another GUI on the portal. We’ve got
to constantly be up to adapt to the ever-changing industry.”
While this constant flux makes it challenging to complete certification paths, New Horizons offers Aptum
additional course trainings and vouchers to ensure their staff is always on the training path to success.
The Results
Feedback from the training courses has been very positive, and a team favorite is the option to complete
the trainings online from home. The ability to have live facilitator training without having to go to a site, in
addition to training offerings compatible with different time zones, has set New Horizons apart from other
training providers
The trainings have also been successful in that most participants go on to pursue their certifications.
“We've recently had several team members get certified on Azure and MS SQL,” says Andy. “Out of the
eight people that took the Azure training over the last few months, the majority of them have reached out to
schedule and take their exams.”
As of now, Aptum Technologies is still using trainings on Azure and SQL. However, Andy says they’re also
starting to implement Amazon AWS courses and looking to expand the number of members from other
departments utilizing the New Horizons trainings