Don’t take risks. Get IBM and Red Hat training with SiXe
Sixe Engineering is made up exclusively of engineers specializing in solutions for data centers and cybersecurity. We are business partners of manufacturers such as IBM, Red Hat,HCL, SUSE, or Lenovo and teach all the courses we offer directly. What about the rest?
Well, really, if you’re looking online for courses on many of the technologies we work with, you’ll see a multitude of companies, hundreds of codes, agendas, offers, and contact forms. They are companies that do not have staffing staff or often know in depth the products of those who sell training. If they have contacts, commercial staff and an extensive network of “collaborators”, as we were when we were studying in college, many years ago.
What’s wrong with that? Well, we always tell our customers the same anecdote. When you go to a restaurant, and 200 dishes of all kinds appear on the menu: meats, fish, pasta, sushi. Does it give you confidence? How do you know they cooked it and it’s fresh? The same is often the same in technical training and technology projects. We live in a world where it is valued more to have a good contact within a company that “buys you things” than an engineering or twenty years of field experience. Quick and easy money. I buy for 10 sell for 20. Does that ring a bell? And if the bridge falls, let it fall.
It is common that, when the course is sold, start a kind of auction in search of the cheapest instructor. In cases of unofficial training, this person will be in charge of providing materials, laboratories, technical support and even choosing a place to have breakfast if tertiary. It’s happened to us many times, and years ago, we even accepted about having the mania to eat every day :-)
What can go wrong? All. Course development takes time, resources. Complex labs don’t set up in an afternoon. Courses need to be tested, debugged, improved with feedback from different sessions. Like everything in life, in the end, the cheap, can be very expensive: courses that have to be repeated, trainings that do not achieve goals, instructors who have not participated in real projects with the technology they teach and a lot of other time.
For many years, we were that last link in the chain. Reliable instructors who called when there was a problem or there was a compromise with a critical customer that could be lost. We have thousands of anecdotes, but the most common thing was that to “protect” that business relationship, until On Monday morning you came to take the course, nor did you know who it was or what needs they had. Other times it was your turn to teach a course that had gone fatal and you had been called to repeat it (without telling you). The best were the situations where the course you were going to take was not what they expected, but it was called similar. Some week of paid leave we owe it to those commercials (and our lawyers).
Usually, when a customer has a need in one of the technologies we master, the phone rings on us as many times as training companies contact us. It seems obvious, but there aren’t as many people who are experts in things like AIX, Red Hat, Tivoli, QRadar, Spectrum Protect or PowerVM, who are available to give a three-day course or catch a plane tomorrow to go to Denmark to track a project.
Over the years, and as our company grew, we opted for a radically different model.
We negotiated with the different manufacturers to provide official training and developed our own courses in those areas where we detected demand and there were no trainings that covered them. We restrict our portfolio to the solutions we master and start selling, whenever we can, training directly. We have to learn to be in addition to instructors, pre-sales, field engineers and even commercials with varying degrees of success. In parallel we continue to work as suppliers of some training companies that resell our courses with a high degree of professionalism, applying us from the first moment and receiving a fair commercial commission. We also participate in international projects as independent instructors from certain manufacturers such as IBM or Lenovo.
Our customers are more than happy. They receive official or tailor-made training sold directly by the people who will deliver it. We offer you the possibility to customize the contents, include consulting or use laboratories that simulate your production environments. When training is not enough, we can help you with professional services and technical support for as long as it takes. We never spend more than 50% of our time training, so we’re pretty up to date on the technologies we work with. All this without reproducing the dynamics that we do not like about this sector and that we have talked about before and ensuring that, if we do not know anything, we do not sell solutions, we do not offer services, nor do we teach courses. Trusted relationships with our customers and technology partners are the foundation of our business and we look forward to following many years.
