22 01732 759725 ManagedIT: What are the mistakes that customers make in their VDI implementations and how can they be avoided? TW: We try and make it really easy for them to make sure mistakes don’t happen. One of the problems with legacy virtual desktop technology is it’s quite complex, and you need someone with the requisite training and experience to be able to deal with all that complexity. Maybe because we have experience of being IT administrators, we’ve tried to design our service to make it as simple as possible for the people who are deploying it. That often goes unremarked upon because quite often organisations don’t care about the guys on the coal face who have to deploy these things, but we think it’s really important so we designed our administration portal to be very intuitive, so much so that in some clients even non-IT staff manage it, and we’ve created documentation to guide people through everything step by step. The biggest mistake people make is that they don’t read the documentation! ManagedIT: What are your plans for 2025? What else can we expect to see from Inevidesk? TW: Our main aim is to raise our profile. We’re starting to look at some events that we will attend and perhaps exhibit at. For example, we have just signed off on a stand at the MSP Show at the ExCeL in May. That’s not an AEC industry event, so it’s a chance for us to talk to a different audience. We’re also looking at a few industry-specific events and aiming to publicise the work we’ve done with partners. Basically, just continuing to build on what we’ve done so far and starting to push into some new areas. www.inevidesk.com because when you have only one or two tech giants dominating an area, you have to pay a lot of money and you don’t necessarily get the service you need. ManagedIT: What typically prompts customers to get in touch with Inevidesk and look at your VDI service? TW: Quite often it’s because they’ve heard of us. It’s word of mouth from peers or maybe they’ve seen us talking on a webinar or something like that. It’s generally prompted by that, and generally at a time when that business is looking to refresh their infrastructure and either replace everything or just their legacy equipment. Interestingly, quite a few clients have come to us when they were having an office move, because they didn’t want to take everything with them. It’s a real effort to build a server room, and moving to a hosted platform like ours beforehand allows them to pick up their laptops, go to their new desk in their new office and start working. ManagedIT: Is sustainability an important factor for your clients? TW: It’s something we talk about quite a lot, because VDI is a lot less carbon impactful than traditional physical workstations. Last year we commissioned a report from a sustainability consultant who calculated that one of our virtual desktops is 62% less carbon impactful than a similarly specified physical workstation. That’s quite a shocking figure but it’s probably not as persuasive as we like to think it is. Many people have sustainability targets within their organisations, but they seem to be a secondary, tertiary or even lower consideration after performance and budget and operations. As far as we are concerned, the sustainability aspect of what we do is just one more really good reason to adopt VDI, along with its performance and costeffectiveness. desktops and plug it into your own on-premises infrastructure and work that way. We have quite a few clients who do that. And we designed it to be incrementally adopted, so no one has to take this huge, scary leap into VDI immediately; they can introduce it slowly and gradually replace legacy workstations. We’re seeing that happen quite a lot. We run a hosted service as well. We have our own private suite in a data centre where we host quite a lot of our clients. We have infrastructure as a service that runs alongside that, so if they want they can host everything with us. Then, we have clients who prefer to host it in their own datacentre or who might be working with an MSP that wants to host in its data centre. We’re open to all those possibilities. We just want people to use our service and get the benefits from it. ManagedIT: How have the changes at VMware impacted you? TW: VMware is one of the big players in the VDI market and has been for 15 years or so – it was only ever VMware and Citrix until quite recently. From our experience of talking to other organisations, it seems to be the most used virtualisation technology for servers and for desktops. VMware has gone through a few owners in its time. It was purchased by Broadcom in 2023 and Broadcom quite rapidly decided to divest itself of the end user computing division, which includes the VDI services so many organisations depend upon. That was bought by a global equity firm which subsequently relaunched it under the Omnissa brand. Among the VMware users we’ve spoken to, there’s still a lot of uncertainty around what’s going to happen with that unresolved dependency between VMware and Omnissa and a lot of frustration about price rises, about the time it takes to get a quote, and about whether or not they can rely on it in the future. As a result, we’re definitely starting to see an appetite for alternatives, which is really healthy, INTERVIEW ...continued
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