iPerformance ApS: “With iSpring, we are obviating the need for on-site training and therefore saving money for the customers”

iPerformance ApS is a Danish software application provider. Their primary product, GiAPA, is a complex technical software solution used by IT experts to optimize server performance. 

Kaare Plesner, owner of iPerformance ApS, shared how they used iSpring Converter to develop a series of product tutorial videos, thereby obviating the need for on-site training and saving money for the customers.

Kaare Plesner, 

Owner of iPerformance ApS

iPerformance ApS Background

Our GiAPA product is very technical software that is used by experienced IT professionals. GiAPA uses AI (Artificial Intelligence) to cope with server performance problems, i.e., unsatisfactory response times, thus eliminating the need to assign the often limited technical manpower to address the problem. 

Explained in one sentence: when running on the rather large IBM Power servers, GiAPA will collect information every 15 seconds about resources used by all running jobs (often much more than a thousand) and automatically show which resources are used for what and by whom, which applications are running inefficiently, and which program statement(s) should be changed to improve performance.

The Challenge: Providing Effective Training to the Growing Number of International Customers

Our policy for providing customer support for our software has always been that the best support you can give is to ensure that support is not needed. However, apart from our software being “intuitive” (as one IBMer said), it is still relatively complex by nature. 

That is why, in the beginning, we usually had to spend 2-3 days on-site with every new customer, the first day being a training course, and the following day or two examining any performance problems of their applications.

As we wanted to also market our software outside Europe, it was obvious that we had to minimize the need for on-site support. To achieve this goal we: 

• made extremely comprehensive tests to verify that everything worked
• created a series of PowerPoint-based tutorials illustrating all functions by live examples

Using iSpring Сonverter Pro helped us a lot by providing a simple way to convert PowerPoints with voice-over to videos. We have used the tool to launch 21 detailed tutorials on GiAPA. Now if someone has a problem with one of the options from the menu, they can see which tutorial is likely to give an explanation and an example.

The Tutorials section on the GiAPA website

Creating Software Tutorials with iSpring Converter

Creating 20 PowerPoint videos was quite a comprehensive task because running my own company I did most of the work myself. It took me around four to five months to develop the PowerPoints, but after a year or two, we much more than broke even on the time invested.

iSpring Converter is very easy and fast to use, with all the undoubtedly complex stuff being transparent for the user.

iSpring Converter Pro provided everything we needed for the creation of tutorial videos. One of the features I appreciated the most was the voice-overs. For our series of tutorials, I had all the voice-overs recorded so I merely needed to upload them to iSpring Converter and synchronize them with the slides and animations. 

Another advantage was that having defined to iSpring Converter how we want the conversion done, we could forget about it and simply hit the “Publish” button. iSpring Converter is very easy and fast to use, with all the undoubtedly complex stuff being transparent for the user.

Publishing tutorials with iSpring Converter

Now, we constantly update our tutorials – IT is developing all the time, and we have to support news in the IBM operating system. Additionally, we create new videos to support major new features that are added to our software.

Results Achieved

I am convinced that it was a very good investment to develop the tutorials. Since we published our series of tutorials covering a complete course on our rather advanced software, we have never been asked to come on-site to teach a training class on the use of our software.

Initially, we had to spend probably 25% of our time “on the road.” Today it may add up to a week every year, and it’s more to make social visits to maintain personal contact with key customers, rather than conducting product training.

GiAPA product training using tutorials created with iSpring Converter Pro

When we get technical questions, in most cases we can simply refer to a few slides within a tutorial. That really saves us a lot of time and is probably also the best answer for the customer, being able to see an example based on real data.

As a result, not only do we see that new customers rarely need to ask any questions, but we also receive very nice feedback on our tutorials. One American customer said that our videos were the best online course he had ever attended — and that is just one of the many positive comments we have received.