Technology Reseller v49

VIRTUAL DESKTOPS 01732 759725 38 When Nerdio Chief Revenue Officer Joseph Landes visited London last month Technology Reseller took the opportunity to catch up with him and find out more about the company, how its products can help MSPs build successful cloud practices in Microsoft Azure and why he thinks we’re at the beginning of a huge transformation in the virtual desktop space allows you to stream your desktop from the Microsoft Azure cloud onto any device you have, anywhere you are, and that's a pretty incredible value proposition. We had a customer in the US that ran a call centre and when a few employees became sick, they had to send everybody home – about 100 employees. They couldn’t tell everyone to take their desktops home on the bus and train – that just wasn’t practical. But what they were able to do was deploy Azure Virtual Desktop. “Employees were sent an email and when they got home, they opened it, clicked on the link and, from any device, they were now able to access their unique desktop, their applications, their profile. It was as if they were sitting at their desk in the call centre. That’s the significant value proposition of virtual desktops in general. “What makes AVD unique, relative to other virtual desktop technologies, is that it’s Microsoft-centric. If you’re using Office 365, it’s a very natural bridge to be able to use Microsoft’s virtual desktop technology as well. That’s why, since Microsoft launched Windows Virtual Desktop in October 2019, we’ve seen it really accelerate.” That growth is reflected in the take up of Nerdio’s own products. “We announced at our recent NerdioCon user conference that we had passed 2 million users under management of Nerdio Manager products. It took us about two years to get to 1 million users and about five months to get the next million users. So growth has been exponential – and we don’t see it slowing down at all.” Incubated by MSPs Nerdio was set up in 2016 to productise and sell technologies that CEO Vadim Vladimirskiy had developed to optimise and manage clients at US MSP practice, Adar, which he had set up in 2005 with the aim of moving every one of his customers to virtual desktops. “In 2018 we launched our first product, Nerdio for Azure, a multi-tenant management product for MSPs looking to move to the cloud with Azure. That very quickly evolved into the two sides of our business that make up Nerdio today. “We have an MSP business that is led by a product called Nerdio Manager for MSP, a multi-tenant deployment management and optimisation platform for MSPs that are looking to move to the cloud with Azure and specifically use either Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) or Windows 365. “And we have an enterprise side of our business with Nerdio Manager for Enterprise, an Azure application that assists IT professionals with deploying, managing and optimising an AVD or Windows 365 environment (see box on page 40). The customer base for our enterprise product covers a wide range of organisations, from a healthcare organisation in New Zealand that has about 200 users to a school in Australia that has about 40,000 users. We call it ‘enterprise’ to differentiate it from the MSP side of our business, which addresses the needs of small and mediumsized businesses.” Key benefits Nerdio helps MSPs and enterprises maximise the benefits of moving to Azure by combining significant efficiencies in the deployment and day-to-day management of virtual desktops with massive cost savings of as much as 80% compared to non-optimised environments. “We have a lot of different pieces to our product, but the one that really stands out, I would say, is our ability to save people For most businesses, launching a major new product on March 19, 2020 would have been unfortunate, perhaps catastrophic. For Nerdio, which enables Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to build successful cloud practices in Microsoft Azure, the launch of Nerdio Manager for Enterprise right at the start of the pandemic was a case of perfect timing. The establishment of this new enterprise-focused part of the business, set up to help end user organisations move to virtual desktops with native Azure Virtual Desktop (formerly called Windows Virtual Desktop) or Windows 365, gained massive impetus from the shift to remote working and enabled Nerdio very quickly to build a large enterprise business alongside its original multi-tenant offering for MSPs. “We launched Nerdio Manager for Enterprise on March 19, 2020 when suddenly every company in the world needed a remote work solution,” explains Nerdio Chief Revenue Officer Joseph Landes. “The business case for Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) was very much accentuated by the pandemic. At its base level, AVD The start of something big Joseph Landes

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