www.managedITmag.co.uk 21 INTERVIEW be a viable and valid solution for more people. ManagedIT: What are some of the key trends affecting the VDI market today? TW: I think there’s still a pull towards the cloud, towards agility and resiliency and flexibility, away from on-premises hardware. Even though some high-profile organisations are demanding people return to the office, that doesn’t negate the need for flexible, agile and resilient infrastructure. One thing we have noticed in the last couple of years is that quite a few organisations that jumped onto Azure in the early days and during the pandemic are now reconsidering being on the public cloud, partly because of its cost and complexity, but also because of increasing concerns about data protection and how people’s data is being used, particularly in light of large language models’ need for data. We’re definitely seeing a move back towards on-premises or private cloud, rather than handing everything over to one of the big tech vendors. ManagedIT: Do you provide your VDI for use on-premises and in a private cloud? TW: Yes, we’re very flexible. We don’t want to predetermine how a client can use our service. You can take one of our pods with virtual IT is all about trust, and people started singing our praises and comparing us very favourably to other ways of working and other solutions which helped us gradually build momentum and introduced us to a much wider group of people, including, in the last year, MSPs and channel partners that recognise what we’ve been doing and are starting to view VDI as an interesting addition to their portfolios. ManagedIT: How advanced are your plans to expand into other areas? TW: We’re developing things quite rapidly, iterating month by month to introduce more flexibility, different functionality and different use cases. Initially, Inevidesk was quite a fixed offering for architects and engineers, a virtual workstation with a dedicated GPU and this and that. It’s much more flexible now, to the point where we can serve anybody from a standard office worker doing lightweight office tasks all the way through to dataintensive AI applications. In the last few weeks, we’ve released the capability to assign multiple GPUs to any one virtual workstation, which is looking like it might be a requirement for certain AI services that need to pull on GPU. We don’t quite know where that’s going, but it’s an example of how we are constantly building up flexibility and agility so that we, our clients and our channel partners can adjust to evolving needs and This enables us to keep costs low and control the performance of both the virtualisation layer and the hardware layer. ManagedIT: You set up Inevidesk in August 2019 and signed your first customer in March 2020. What impact did the pandemic have on your business? TW: It was a very strange time because we were beta testing with a couple of organisations, and things were going well. Then the pandemic hit, and one of them immediately said ‘this is the kind of technology we’re going to need now’ and bought all our stock. Covid changed people’s perceptions of how you can work and where you can work, particularly in the industry we were in which had never really supported hybrid and remote working – it was very office-based, with people sitting at desks with big, powerful tower workstations and a couple of monitors, working away on 2D and 3D designs. The pandemic showed that people could do this from anywhere, so long as they had a reasonable internet connection. Suddenly we were able to have conversations about organisations’ infrastructure, where they employ people, how they connect multiple offices, including international offices, and how they use their office space. You don’t have to have one person per desk; you can be much more creative and agile. One key thing that has come out of that whole period is the need to be resilient and to be agile, because no one knows what is going to happen in the future. No one can say ‘This is how we’re going to work for the next 10 years’. You have to be able to respond to changes on an annual or even a monthly basis. ManagedIT: How have you grown since those early days? TW: Slowly at first. We utilised our existing network to bed in our VDI technology, deal with any immediate issues and ensure everything was working and then just spread out from there through direct sales, events and webinars. continued... Photo: pixabay.com/TyliJura
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