Conversations with Customers: Cloud VDI Shines for Users and IT
There are few things I love more than talking with Workspot customers and prospects. In this “Conversations with Customers” blog series, I usually report to you about my conversations with prospects and their requirements. This week I’m shifting gears a bit because one of the conversations I had with an existing Workspot customer underscores how their Workspot Cloud VDI shines over their old legacy implementation.
As everyone knows, many organizations don’t speak publicly about the technology solutions they adopt, often because they are achieving a competitive advantage and don’t wish to reveal how they’re achieving it. This is especially true in the financial services and healthcare industries. So without mentioning any names, here’s some food for thought that I took away from this customer meeting; I think it might be interesting for you.
Strategic Move Away from Legacy VDI to Cloud VDI
I talk with many enterprise organizations that have cloud-first strategies, and our discussions, of course, are around how moving physical desktops to Azure through our turnkey service delivers significant benefits beyond other approaches to virtual desktops. For this customer, the compelling event to rethink desktop management was less about an overall cloud-first dictate and more about ongoing reliability problems with legacy VDI that were forcing change. The company has a mobile workforce and several use cases to address different types of users; they could no longer afford to tolerate slow performance and downtime. At the same time, they also came to understand that a cloud VDI solution would bring greater opportunities to grow the overall business because of the agility benefits.
Initial Use Cases & Plans for Expansion
Business Development
One team travels extensively, worldwide, meeting with clients and prospective clients. The device of choice for this team is the Microsoft Surface tablet. Whereas these travelers used to grapple with slow access to the apps and data they need for their meetings, now they simply log in to their Workspot cloud desktop and quickly access what they need. They are finding the solution to be much more reliable, with far greater performance than their old VDI solution.
Design Engineers
Another group has a need for high-performance computing, and like most companies, they standardized on physical workstations. However, the IT team realized that if they could accommodate engineers’ requests for the flexibility to work from home, the business would actually benefit from increased productivity, especially when an employee had to stay home with a sick child or needed to intercept a home delivery – all everyday “life” scenarios we all experience. In those cases, productivity would have been sacrificed, because you can’t just pick up a big workstation and lug it home! Now with Workspot cloud workstations, design engineers can be productive anywhere with a lightweight endpoint such as a laptop, or even a tablet when they need to be really mobile. That is life-changing for them and means greater productivity for the business.
Administrative Staff
Having successfully implemented the first two use cases, the IT team is turning its attention to expanding the Workspot footprint. Most of the people who keep the day to day operations of the company going, including executive assistants, as well as finance and HR personnel, don’t need GPU power. So to solve the problem of slow legacy VDI performance and reduce the need for maintenance and hardware refreshes for physical PCs, IT is assessing the scope of a new use case that would provide cloud desktops, and in some cases cloud apps (where only access to a few apps is needed) to this group of users.
More Power Users In Phase 2
A couple of months after the initial Workspot production rollout, the IT team surveyed the user base. The survey results were somewhat surprising. It’s often the case that power users (those who work with GPU-intensive apps) are very reluctant to give up their physical workstations because they worry about performance. So when the rest of the company’s power users requested “a Workspot” during the next expansion, the IT team was surprised and happy, because the performance of the cloud workstations during the first phase was so outstanding, power users want to go all-in. Having the flexibility to work anywhere and also adopt a lightweight laptop in exchange for a bulky workstation or heavy-duty laptop is really attractive. This is all good news for the bottom line too because new opportunities are going up, infrastructure costs are going down, and IT resources have been redeployed to better support end users, no infrastructure micro-management required!
The entire Workspot team is super happy about this customer story because it’s the best illustration of our company DNA: Make customers wildly happy, transform their organizations so they are free to grow, and provide flexibility and amazing performance for users so everyone will want “a Workspot!” That’s what keeps us going! Take the next step to see how Cloud VDI shines compared to legacy approaches.
Where’s your Workspot? Ready to learn more about how Workspot can address your use cases? You can compare approaches to virtual desktops using the G.E.T. Framework, then schedule a demo so we can talk more in-depth about your requirements.
The G.E.T Framework for comparing approaches to virtual desktops.
