At a time when enterprises' IT resources are stretched and employees are being asked to do more with less, ISUG and eLearnIT are joining forces to provide a comprehensive online training program for PowerBuilder that is affordable and easy for participants to complete on their own time. With the PowerBuilder 12 .NET Beta now available and general availability on the horizon, 5 Minute Briefing: Sybase talks with Mike Harrold, executive director of ISUG, and Yakov Werde, president of eLearnIT LLC, about their new initiative for ISUG members and the value it holds
5 Minute Briefing: What are the needs in the marketplace that you are addressing with this training program?
Werde: There are several needs in the marketplace. The first is the need for increasing the supply of PowerBuilder-enabled software developers. There is a shortage of them and many shops that have important PowerBuilder applications are considering the future of those applications. One of the things that factor into their decisions is the availability of skilled professionals to work on those apps.
5 Minute Briefing: Does ISUG feel that this type of training is critical to its mission?
Harrold: I believe that 100%, and the primary reason is that when we go out on the road and talk to people, whether it is at conferences, user group meetings, and events or seminars, one of the things we hear consistently-and this isn't just with PowerBuilder or even Sybase for that matter-is how can they get cost-effective training for their employees. The standard complaint is that the training is expensive and it isn't just the cost of training itself: It is the cost of traveling to a training class if it's not local, and the time out of the office.
We believe that training courses that can be delivered online is going to be the way forward in educating people in technologies. It is the only effective way to do it without causing grave interference between what responsibilities an employee is currently assigned to at their job and what they are being reassigned to, or being given added responsibility for.
Our members are always looking for this, and equally importantly, the companies that our members work for are always looking for the best way to educate their people on technology, regardless of what the technology is. Over the next 5 to 10 years this is going to be the primary way that technologists educate themselves.
5 Minute Briefing: Why does this shortage of PowerBuilder developers exist?
Harrold: PowerBuilder is a mature technology-Sybase is about to release version 12-so it is no longer considered sexy by new developers. This is not specific to PowerBuilder; this happens eventually with more or less every technology developed. There are a lot of people today that no longer consider Java to be sexy either! So getting new people to invest their time in learning a technology that is perceived as not having the career prospects as something newer like Ruby or .NET is a challenge.
What's key about PowerBuilder though is that the companies that do have these, in some cases, massive enterprise applications sitting on top of PowerBuilder are continuing to use it because it is such a good piece of technology. It is important that we address the need to make sure that those companies continue to see new developers come into the marketplace that they can hire on to maintain and expand their applications as necessary.
5 Minute Briefing: Why did ISUG select eLearningIT as its training partner for this effort?
Harrold: eLearningIT has the knowledge to produce high-quality content that there is a need for in the marketplace. We are starting with PowerBuilder and then we will move on to other areas. ISUG obviously has the reach into the Sybase community, contacts with the organizations that use PowerBuilder. This program brings together eLearning on the content side and ISUG on the marketing side
5 Minute Briefing: Does eLearningIT host other courses as well?
Werde: We are a new company and we took what we knew best to launch our first product. We are working on a couple of others now. Our company is focused on producing web-based e-learning experiences for informational technology products.
5 Minute Briefing: Is eLearningIT's experience primarily in PowerBuilder since that is the course that is being used to launch the company?
Werde: That is correct. I have been a PowerBuilder instructor for 13 years. I worked for Sybase. I was a Sybase PowerBuilder instructor for 10 years and for 3 years before that I was a contractor to PowerSoft Corporation.
5 Minute Briefing: Who is this class targeted at?
Werde: It's targeted at developers within corporate organizations, IT professionals who have been assigned responsibility for a PowerBuilder application and need to ramp up quickly. Secondly, it is targeted at technical colleges, specifically the two-year sort where they produce educated entry-level software developers so that if there is a corporate need in their area for PowerBuilder developers, this course can be offered through an online experience.
5 Minute Briefing: Why is it so important get trained on PowerBuilder now?
Werde: PowerBuilder version 12 .NET was just released in beta. It represents the next-generation technology for PowerBuilder applications. As these large applications age and come up for maintenance, the underlying technologies that they were built on have now moved to the next generation. The PowerBuilder12 .NET product represents a logical and broad path to move the existing applications to next-generation technologies.
A lot of organizations have been holding back. They have been looking at the possibility of rewriting these large applications-many of them have tried multiple times and failed-and now there is going to be quite a bit of interest in moving these PowerBuilder-based applications still based in the PowerBuilder platform to the next generation based on .NET technologies. Sybase as well as the PowerBuilder community is anticipating an upswing of interest in PowerBuilder development.
5 Minute Briefing: How does the ISUG training program work? How would someone sign up for the class?
Harrold: People can go to the ISUG website and purchase the course directly using a credit card. Upon completion they will receive an email from eLearningIT contianing their user name and password information for accessing the course online.
Werde: The purchase price is $695 which includes 3 months of unlimited access which is enough for a person to go through this course multiple times. We don't anticipate anyone going through this thing in one shot. It is a rich media experience utilizing Flash. It includes videos, audio of me explaining, text, hands-on lab exercises, and demonstrations. It truly is the equivalent of a live instructor-led course. I would estimate it takes about 30 hours for a person to go through the course once. Additionally, ISUG is hosting a forum for this course and we monitor the forum. When someone posts a question, we will respond with an answer.
5 Minute Briefing: Do you expect other collaborations on training between ISUG and eLearningIT?
Harrold: We're continually evaluating where we go next with this training concept. Our goal is to provide our membership with career enhancement opportunities on an on-going basis, and this educational offering is one form of that. Currently we're looking at some options for advanced PowerBuilder developers as well as courses for other Sybase products. We expect to release at least one more course with eLearnIT in 2009, with more to come next year.