The last few years have offered easy and exciting ways to demonstrate packaged software to customers.  One of the frustrating things, both as a prospective customer and a product manager, is getting a sandbox demonstration environment together (especially for complex not-available-through-SaaS types of software – which usually means most enterprise software available today).

First there was VMWare and Microsoft Virtual Server (VHD) virtual machine images to demonstrate software.  The problem there was always: who wants to download a 600-900mb VMWare image and deploy it on their personal laptop?  And furthermore, who has the local computing resources for it? 

Now Adobe has taken it one step further, offering 10 hours of runtime on an Amazon EC2 hosted image that includes LiveCycle ES Solution Components for customers of the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program.

Additional details from Adobe:

• Provides pre-installed, pre-configured virtual instances of LiveCycle ES.
• Reduce time required to download, install and boot new server instances.
• Develop LC ES applications in a fraction of the time.
• Virtual instances can be used as to build proof-of-concepts

Using virtual machines hosted on the cloud is a good way to let customers play around in a sandbox environment.  If you’re not already a pure-play SaaS provider, and you don’t have a sandbox datacenter of your own that you want to maintain, this could be a good alternative.

[Adobe LiveCycle ES Developer Express c/o InformationWeek]

Filed under: Cloud Computing, Enterprise Web, Product Management, SaaS