Radius System S4 Boot Camp
Earlier this Fall Radius Systems became a S4 Integration Partner https://www.thes4group.com/articles/welcome-to-radius-systems-llc. From the start it was obvious that this was not going to be a typical partnership. Mike Helm wanted his team to jump in and get involved immediately! They were committed to making the S4 technology a core part of their business strategy.
The typical partner startup involves sending a few employees to the S4 Group offices here in Ogden for a two day S4 Boot Camp. Mike wanted to train 12 people. So, it was much more practical to take the Boot Camp to them!
We shipped our Building-In-A-Box test/demo system to their offices in advance of our arrival for use in the hands on exercises. It quickly became obvious that we couldn’t follow the normal procedure of having the students do hands on exercises after each training module. There were simply too many students with such varied backgrounds to make this practical. So, instead we made the first day of boot camp a lecture and demonstration day. The attendees were a cross section of all skills so we made this a combination of technology and value proposition discussions. The 2nd day was then dedicated to hands on activities with a subset of the group who would need to install and support the systems.
One of the key factors in the success of this boot camp was the active participation of the students. IT support was right there to make sure that all the systems worked flawlessly.
Several of the Radius Systems team were either ex-JCI employees or had extensive experience with the Metasys® system. So, they quickly grasped the concepts behind the S4 Open: BACnet-N2 Router and helped to reinforce the lessons in the context of both working with the legacy Metasys® technology and bringing it into their Automated Logic WebCTRL environment.
The Radius marketing team was there capturing the event in candid photos. The pictures used in this article were provided by them.
The Radius System training room has a wall dedicated to systems used exclusively for employee training and customer demonstrations. 
Radius purchased a S4 demo system that will become a permanent part of this facility. They are strong believers that seeing is believing for many of their customers.
Flight schedules for the return trip to Ogden left most of the 3rd day available. So, I accompanied Mike and Jeff on a customer visit where they tried out their newly learned skills. As always in situations like this I made sure that I was playing a supporting role and the Radius team was delivering the message. They did a great job and it looks like they are well on their way to their first sale of a Metasys® integration project. I suspect that there will be many more to follow.