Revolution in Vendor Education?

A lot of discussions are going on around and how they would revolutionize college education. Of course, it would be interesting to see what would be an outcome – although I don’t expect to see drastic changes in traditional education soon, probably it will trigger some evolutional changes (and MOOCs don’t sound as something completely new for me – rather a next step in slow evolution of online / remote education).

I found rather interesting their application in another market – in vendor training. It was, in my understanding, a very stable market with expensive classes without much checking of results (as you pay for the class, you get a certificate). Sometimes complemented by a certification program – where for some money your knowledge is checked and confirmed by a nice title and certificate. All variations I saw so far included doing the same classes online or selling training materials (for the price comparable to the cost of actual class).

I was surprised to find that 10gen provides – a leading NoSQL database. The classes look well-designed and include meaningful knowledge check (only those who get up to some level get a certificate). I was also surprised to learn that they have thousands of people enrolled for a specific class – considering that MongoDB is rather a specialized product. Probably introducing these free online classes contributed to popularity of MongoDB, which looks like the most popular NoSQL database for the moment.

While I don’t know if other vendors follow the example, it looks revolutionary for me. Not from the technological point of view – it looks in line with other MOOC technology allowing a huge number of students with relatively moderate efforts to manage it. But from the business point of view, when a vendor voluntarily gives up training revenue for spreading a word about their technology and building up a community of loyal users. It was even more surprising because MongoDB is open source and 10gen doesn’t have a stream of revenue from software licenses (at least from the base product) – so giving up one more stream of potential revenue doesn’t sounds self-evident. But indeed the benefits they get with such approach are probably much more significant that the stream of revenue they could get (and maybe they are still getting it doing more traditional training for those who wants it – and their share may be larger due to a larger number of people familiar with the technology).

It is definitely a very important precedent which potentially may overturn the whole vendor training market. It would be interesting to see if other follow the pattern – and, I guess, those who follow may see a noticeable competitive advantage. Of course, MongoDB is an open-source product and it may be not so straightforward for proprietary commercial products. Although many vendors have some kind of limited licenses (evaluation, developer, limited edition, etc.) anyway that potentially allows to have that kind of online courses.

Another side effect may be the destruction of third-party basic training for specific products. If free training is available, you can’t just live on teaching basics to people – you need add value to have people paying (whatever this value is).

I see some hints that it may become a trend. It looks like free online tutorials become a standard. BlazeMeter putting together JMeter educational videos. It looks like the Practical Performance Analyst site gave up on the idea to charge for – so they are available now for free. Evan large companies share a lot of free educational video. See, for example, Oracle Learning Library. Of course, free videos is not a full class with checking knowledge and providing a certificate – so it may take some time until we see it as mainstream (although I may miss other important developments as far as the subject itself is not my primary interest).