Instructor-led training is where the most important learning happens, and is also where operations breaks down first. Administrate and CloudShare have built a native integration so scheduling, lab provisioning, and reporting stay in sync automatically. One joint customer, Ping Identity, saw registrations grow 567% when implementing the connected workflow.
Here’s how it works: a learner registers for a course in Administrate, and their CloudShare environment is provisioned and ready. Rosters and contact data stay synced across both platforms. Lab engagement and completion data flows back into Administrate’s reporting. A cancellation in either system updates both. Nobody copies anything by hand.
If you run virtual instructor-led training on complex software, you are managing two workflows that have almost nothing to do with each other operationally but everything to do with each other in practice. On one side sits scheduling, registration, instructor assignment, and compliance tracking. On the other sits lab provisioning, learner engagement, and skill validation. Without a connection between them, somebody on your team has to manually connect them every time a class runs. At a hundred learners a year that is an annoyance. At ten thousand it needs its own budget.
“Administrate and CloudShare solve different halves of the same problem,” said Matt Crawford, Vice President of Strategic Alliances at CloudShare. “Administrate runs the program, CloudShare runs the experience. This partnership means we’re no longer asking customers to choose one investment over the other.”
Andrew Rivkin, Director of Strategic Partnerships at Administrate, describes the mechanics: “Schedule a session in Administrate and the lab, or labs, are provisioned and ready to go. No more manual work to keep both systems synced.”
The integration is available now.
Ping Identity grew registrations 567% with Administrate & Cloudshare
One of our shared customers, Ping Identity uses the connected workflow to train thousands of learners in complex technical environments.
Ping Identity provides identity and access management software: single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, directory services. Their customers are developers, engineers, and technology leads at large enterprises, and the product is complicated enough that training is a critical for end users. Leonie Schwede, Ping’s director of customer training, has led her team through a period of rapid growth and high training demand. Training is a revenue generator for Ping Identity, and Leonie’s team tripled training revenues, but stayed roughly the same size the entire time.
Problem: Instructor-led Training That Couldn’t Scale
Self-paced training was long, inflexible, and hard to search.
Course materials took about five minutes per registration to issue by hand, and with 2,300 annual registrations that added up to one person spending five full working weeks a year on registration admin alone. A partner in the Americas who enrolled on a Friday afternoon waited until Monday, because the team issuing their materials was in EMEA. When the materials finally arrived, they arrived as three separate emails from three separate systems: one confirming registration, one from CloudShare with lab access, one from the book provider with a code.
“If I don’t provide my student with the materials immediately after they registered,” Leonie said, “chances are they are stopping right there and then.”
Solution: Administrate + Cloudshare
Ping Identity created a composable tech stack with Administrate at the center as a system of record, CloudShare handling labs, and a headless learning portal on the front end that Ping built themselves. The headless portal is what the learners interacted with, while Administrate and Cloudshare worked in the background.
Administrate stores the CloudShare blueprint ID for every course chapter, so the right environment spins up for the right module without anyone selecting it. CloudShare’s inactivity timers suspend an environment after two weeks of disuse and delete it after three, which holds infrastructure costs down while letting a learner who comes back pick up exactly where they left off.
Having built a system that could handle their existing catalog automatically, Leonie’s team had the bandwidth to focus on training content, engagement, and learner experience. Hour-long videos became five to ten minute modules, each tagged and described, each teaching one objective, each with its own micro badge and, often, its own lab. Administrate was able to organize, manage, and serve this content up to the headless learner portal. This resulted in a 10x increase in content. That meant more crawlable content for search engines and AI to find and recommend. That also meant a 10x increase in provisioning events. Cloudshare could spin up, manage, and archive environments automatically so scale was no problem.
Together, Administrate and Cloudshare saved the Ping Identity team more than eight months of manual labor that was previously spent entirely on managing enrollments and issuing labs.
Results
Registrations scaled a shocking 567% thanks to the changes to content discoverability, and completion rates went from 30 percent to 48 percent. For context, the average completion rate sits around 12.6 percent — all possible thanks to the Administrate & Cloudshare partnership.
Ping’s broader results track with what we see elsewhere. CloudShare customers report 365% higher course completion and a 311% increase in buyer engagement. Administrate customers automate on average 87% percent of their training operations, saving hundreds of hours every quarter.
If your team is still manually connecting registration, provisioning, and reporting every time a class runs, that’s the exact challenge this integration was built to solve. Let’s talk.
