Hyland Shifts to the Cloud, Empowers Employees to Earn 200 AWS Certifications

Hyland was founded in 1991 and has more than 4,000 employees in dozens of countries around the globe. The company offers solutions to manage content across an entire organization. Because Hyland had been developing on-premises software for more than 30 years, the company recognized that migrating to the cloud to keep pace with customer demand would require a larger culture shift across the organization. “Our teams were eager to accelerate our shift to a software-as-a-service company, and we knew that, by moving toward AWS, we could make that shift with a leading partner,” says Matt Beyer, AWS alliance manager at Hyland.

Hyland became an AWS Partner in 2020 and turned to AWS Partner Training and Certification to train its employees. “Hyland decided that AWS was going to be our cloud vendor of choice, and we were building our new, cloud-native products on AWS,” says Beyer. “So, it was a natural next step to have our employees become certified and well versed in the AWS Cloud.”

As of January 2022, Hyland employees held 32 AWS Certifications, but the company wanted to ramp up engagement and encourage more team members to get certified. After consulting with AWS, Hyland implemented a program called Certs for Shirts, in which employees earn a T-shirt to recognize their effort in obtaining an AWS Certification, in addition to being showcased at a weekly all-company meeting. “The program elevated employee awareness, as well as the overall engagement with AWS,” says Anne Siess, AWS Partnership specialist at Hyland. “Acquiring an AWS Certification is not a walk in the park. The effort is significant, and passing an exam deserves to be celebrated!”

Alongside AWS, Hyland’s team hosted two onsite trainings focused on AWS Cloud Practitioner Essentials. In addition, AWS provided an online, instructor-led cloud accreditation course for Hyland sales executives. Initially, just 30 people were expected to attend the trainings, but other teams asked to join, resulting in more than 100 participants in each session. And 100 percent of the participants completed the accreditation course. “AWS showed up with a training framework that engaged our employees and sparked interest in department managers to do more,” says Siess.

In just 1 year, Hyland employees earned more than 200 certifications, a 600 percent increase. The company started with the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner certification, which offers a foundational understanding of AWS Cloud concepts, services, and terminology, before progressing to other, more specialized certifications. Hyland’s sales engineers pursued the AWS Certified Security - Specialty training to build and validate expertise in securing data and workloads in the cloud. The training has spurred the adoption of security offerings like AWS PrivateLink, a service for establishing connectivity between VPCs and AWS services without exposing data to the internet. This helped maintain the privacy and continuity that Hyland’s customers prefer when its systems are integrated with business-critical applications.

In addition, several sales engineers have pursued the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate training path and credentials, which showcase knowledge and skills in AWS technology across a wide range of AWS services. They have since used their knowledge to reimagine how they run demo environments during the presale process. In addition, the research and development team is using its AWS skills to explore artificial intelligence and machine learning solutions, such as AWS SageMaker, a service for building, training, and deploying machine learning models, with the goal of creating better experiences for Hyland’s customers. “Employees’ knowledge of what’s possible is spurring creativity across the entire organization,” says Beyer.