3 Ways to Get the Most Out of Cloud Trial Software

Technology is constantly evolving to tackle existing and new business challenges, and one of the lowest-friction ways for an organization to test out whether a potential solution is the right fit is by trying the product before making an investment. With the announcement of a broad set of new trial versions of our enterprise next-gen iPaaS, here are a few things we’ve learned over the years with regard to free trials.

Why Try a Trial?

It’s always a good idea to test-drive software if you have the opportunity. At the most basic level, a free trial helps you get a good feel for the software’s features and capabilities. You can simply try out a product, see if you like the breadth and depth of functionality, scalability, and interface, and decide if it helps make your life easier.

But you can also take trial a step further and actually use it to develop a proof of concept (PoC) to show to management. If you’re trying to build a business case for a solution, a trial can help you get an idea for how the software can help increase productivity, improve process efficiency, or enable a business objective.

3 Best Practices for Test-Driving Trial Software

Software trials give you access to a product for a limited timeframe—often 30 days. Here’s how to make the most of that time.

• Think ahead of time about what data challenge you want to solve. Make a list of pain points or upcoming initiatives. Maybe partner onboarding takes forever in your organization—in that case, try out a B2B gateway solution.

• Use the trial to explore as much of the product capabilities as possible – what’s the interface like? How easy is it to perform basic tasks? Go beyond setup so that you’re actually using the product to run jobs and create assets.

• Take advantage of additional resources – look for communities, tutorials, guided tours, and more. And most trial software has a support team you can contact if you get stuck.

Why It’s Especially Important to Try Out Cloud Services

We know data management is moving to the cloud. But for many organizations, it’s going to be a hybrid world for some time. As you look to modernize parts of your data environment in the cloud, trial software is a great way to see how cloud fits into your existing data landscape. You can use a trial version to create a prototype for a larger project and test it out in your environment. For instance, if you plan to modernize your existing data warehouses in the cloud, you can use the Informatica trial version of our cloud data warehouse service.

And if you’ve been using an on-premises version of a particular service, trying the cloud service is a great, low-risk way to see what the experience is like. Maybe you’ve been using Informatica Data Quality. Now you can try Cloud Data Quality.

New iPaaS Trial Versions

At Informatica, we’ve revamped our cloud trial to deliver a better experience. Recognizing that different organizations have different objectives and pain points, we’ve launched trial versions for 10 different use cases. So whether it’s data integration, application integration, data quality, ingestion, API management—or something else—we’ve got the trial version for you.

See the full list of available iPaaS trials and sign up on our cloud trial page.