Google acquires Qwiklabs, a cloud platform training startup

Google has acquired Qwiklabs, a hands-on learning platform. Qwiklabs was founded in 2012 and offers hands-on lab learning environments for cloud platforms and infrastructure vendors. The financial terms aren’t disclosed. It basically offers step-by-step instructions to learn a popular cloud service and also test different use cases in order to train the team. “There’s no faster way to get hands-on experience with a cloud environment and to learn all the ins and outs of today’s modern cloud solutions than in a Qwiklabs lab,” claims Google in a blogpost. More than half a million users have collectively spent over 5 million hours learning to deploy and manage multiple cloud technologies using Qwiklabs platform. And, with this acquisition, Google believes it will find a comprehensive and efficient way to train and onboard people across its products like G Suite, Google cloud platform and so on. In a another blogpost, Qwiklabs wrote that it will continue to offer lab learning credits and subscriptions for sale on Qwiklabs.com. Those with existing credits and subscriptions can continue to enjoy the same access to the library of hands-on labs and partners who deliver instructor-led training sessions and events can also continue to do so. “Our mission has been to transform technology learning from a passive watching experience to a hands-on doing experience,” the blogpost adds. The startup believes that joining Google will give them ‘more fuel to power the continued journey’. Meanwhile, a recent survey, conducted on 900 executives by Cloud Foundry ( via ZDnet), reveals that 64 percent companies found a shortage of qualified workers with cloud skills.