As we approach the last days of 2019, I wanted to reach out to thank you for being a Cloud Academy customer. When Giacomo and I started Cloudacademy.com in 2013, we envisioned building a new way of teaching cloud and IT technologies to people and organizations worldwide.
In six years, we have been lucky enough to see our team working with Fortune 500 companies and hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. We are technology people and we wanted to create a platform different from all the others, with a combination of great content and software, to make the learning experience highly interactive.
After all these years, we are just as excited about the work as we were on day one. And the reason for that is because of customers like you — because of your trust and support. The constant feedback, requests, and amazing responses are what keep all of us focused on our vision.
Our customers consumed millions of hours of content in the last 12 months, and thanks to our merge with QA, we have been able to add several new learning paths across different areas including Agile, Cyber Security, and Project Management — and more are coming online every month.
It’s been a fantastic year where we have seen our customers really use Cloud Academy to run global training programs at scale, in a way we couldn’t imagine before!
New content and software features in 2019
In 2019, we published more than 227 courses in our Training Library, worked on 92 new Hands-on Labs, and added Hands-on Labs Challenges to our platform. In total, we published more than 40 Learning Paths, each containing about 30+ hours of content.
At Cloud Academy, we focus on building content and software, and then combine them to create a unique experience for our customers.
In the last 12 months, we went live with a completely redesigned version of our Management Dashboard for our enterprise customers, and we constantly improved our Training Plans by adding “Nudge” and “Auto-nudge” features to help keep your team accountable and on track.
Additionally, we created a new version of our Skill Profiles, the analytics software included in Cloud Academy that allows our customers to assess and validate your organization’s skills in real-time (available both for companies and end-users). In addition, onboarding new users in Cloud Academy is now easier than ever and has a full guided experience with several new roles and options.
Labs Challenges went live in 2019 and are non-guided practical skill validations to demonstrate problem-solving skills using our sandboxed accounts on AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform — basically hands-on labs with the gloves off. This new experience challenges you to implement and work in real environments in a public cloud — without instructions or hints. To pass, our technology checks the state of your lab environment. Everything is then connected to our Skills Profiles to have a constant understanding of how your skills are really evolving.
We continued to work on integrations. In addition to our SSO guided configuration, our Okta integration is live and we now have a set of new APIs to help large organizations manage teams and training at scale.
We also created more and more functionalities inside Content Engine, our software suite that allows our enterprise customers to customize and create content for their end-users. You can now create custom labs to test your teams in live environments to match your exact enterprise deployment. We simplified our user interface to allow you to quickly create custom exams from scratch. In addition, we streamlined the process for you to create personalized content for your team by enabling you to clone and edit all of our expert training content.
And finally, our mobile users have seen monthly improvements to our iOS and Android apps. They are now super fast and let you download our content for offline studying. Our team of product engineers is constantly shipping new features and improvements for our platform on a daily basis.
What’s next for you in 2020
We will keep releasing new unique features in our platform as we continue to envision building an enterprise platform to assess, develop, and validate technology skills at scale.
As an enterprise SaaS platform, Cloud Academy is always focused on building innovative software both for our end-users and for large and distributed management teams that use our software to assess and develop their tech skills.
We spend a lot of time testing new ways of learning and enabling companies to really deliver results in their organizations through cloud training. In 2020, we are ready to launch new learning products and new critical software features for our platform with a clear objective of showing insights and a return on investment in your skills. More integrations and additions to our API library are also coming to our management dashboard to let our customers use Cloud Academy in a seamless way.
Our content team is expanding as well. We have an ambitious plan to keep working on critical areas like DevOps, Programming, Cyber Security, and of course, everything cloud — from vendors to real use cases. Our content roadmap is busy and will get even better in the next months, and everything will always be included in your subscription!
We love your feedback and input — keep them coming!
Feel free to contact your Customer Success Manager to learn more about what’s coming in 2020, or contact us at support@cloudacademy.com for any questions!
Thank you again for being a customer!
Stefano Bellasio
CEO and Founder, Cloud Academy Inc
