Each time I speak with a customer to get caught up on their experience with Workspot, I’m always ready to hear the good and the bad. We encourage complete openness throughout the POC and deployment processes and beyond because that’s what ultimately forges a strong partnership; it’s what makes all of us successful. What’s really cool is that by the time customers are ready to talk with Marketing, our Customer Success team has already worked their magic, and we get to hear all the great results from really happy customers. It’s always a great day when I get to catch up with a production customer. During my previous conversation with a customer, I directly asked them “Is there anything we can improve? Any area where you were dissatisfied?. The response was “I can’t think of anything… can I get back to you on that?” We plan to keep it that way.
The conversation I want to share with you today is particularly interesting (and hopefully helpful to those of you evaluating cloud desktops) because this customer really did their homework. They evaluated five vendors and ran POCs with two, one of which was Workspot. Here’s the story!
Time to Go Cloud
This global company has developers all over the world, and the company had several reasons for wanting to move away from their on-premises VDI solution. Information security was a primary reason why they decided to use virtual desktops in the first place, and that is a very good reason, but their traditional solution was no longer making sense for them. Like so many organizations, they made a strategic decision to have a cloud-first initiative. They did not want to manage on-premises hardware any longer, nor did they want to continue dealing with the complexity of running a data center and applying precious resources to those tasks. The goal was to streamline all of this so their resources could be more appropriately applied to the core competencies of their business.
While all of this strategic decision-making was happening, it also became clear that the developers and other remote workers using the legacy VDI solution were not at all happy with their non-persistent desktops. That’s because each time you log off a non-persistent desktop, it wipes the slate clean and you get a new virtual desktop when you log back in. There’s nothing personalized about it. Even with profile management software added on, the solution was not satisfactory. It was harder to manage, slower to load and caused a lot more help desk tickets.
Some Serious Due Diligence
The team heading up the evaluation of new approaches to virtual desktops included some folks who are very experienced with VDI solutions, so they planned to really put the options to the test. They identified 5 vendors – the household names in VDI, plus a couple of newer vendors for their evaluation. In short, one vendor was eliminated because they could only support session-based desktops “skinned” to look like Windows 10 desktops. They could not actually support real Windows 10 desktops. The next vendor was eliminated becuase they could not scale adequately and the organization’s team was rather inexperienced in the world of VDI. Another vendor was eliminated because it was just as complex as the old VDI solution. And that left two vendors to move on to the next round: the POC! Workspot had the POC up and running in a few days. Technically we can do it even faster, but IT teams have a ton of competing priorities, so we work closely to get things up and running as fast as possible, given everyone’s schedules. Meanwhile, vendor X struggled to get their POC running, not because of busy schedules, but because the person working on the project had little expertise, particularly with Azure. Our customer told us that they were very impressed with the expertise and seniority of the Workspot Customer Success team, who had them live with very little work on the customer’s part.
In the end, the customer found Workspot to be functionally superior to vendor X, and the depth of the partnership they experienced, from sales, to POC, to production rollout, was outstanding and exactly what they were looking for. Long story short, Workspot soundly beat 4 competitors to win the privilege of helping transform this company.
Then and Now
What do their results look like so far? Here are the key takeaways:
Simplicity: The IT team loves Workspot’s turnkey service. It has allowed them to dramatically simplify IT operations and use resources more strategically to grow the business. They don’t have to worry about hardware refreshes, storage or managing a data center.
Reduced costs: OpEx is lower because highly valuable engineers are no longer needed to maintain and troubleshoot complex, on-prem VDI. Workspot does the heavy lifting behind the scenes; that’s why the architecture of the solution you choose is really important, and there is literally nothing like Workspot out there.
Security: Because of the nature of the company, they had many information security requirements to meet. Workspot’s architecture is highly secure; unlike other solutions, we separated the control and data planes, and that is a critical move for security. because it means that your data cannot be accessed by us or anyone else. That is Zero Trust security. This is a critical area to understand during your evaluation.
User experience: Cloud desktop users now have a personalized experience with their persistent desktops. They can use the device of their choice, whether it’s a Windows laptop, Mac, iPhone or Android device to access their cloud desktop in Azure anytime, anywhere.
Partnership Matters
I’ve said it before: Workspot is obsessed with customer success. That’s why we’ve built a seasoned Customer Success team consisting of VDI and Azure industry experts who accelerate your success. The difference shows. Our job is to make end-user computing easy for your company so you can get back to your area of expertise and spend time on projects that help grow the business. We work closely with our customers’ in-house IT teams, who can be as hands-on or hands-off as they want during deployment. That’s the beauty of our turnkey cloud desktop service – it just works, so you can leave the cloud desktops to the experts (us!).
Ready to learn more? Schedule a demo and we’ll show you how our turnkey cloud desktop service can change your life!
Conversations With Customers
