technologyreseller.co.uk 21 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. Technology Reseller: 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 many organisations depend on. That was bought by a global equity firm which subsequently relaunched it under the Omnissa brand, but among 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. are constantly building up flexibility and agility so that we, our clients and our channel partners can adjust to evolving needs and be a viable and valid solution for more people. Technology Reseller: 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 highprofile 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. Technology Reseller: 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 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 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. Technology Reseller: 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. 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. Technology Reseller: 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 data-intensive 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 INTERVIEW Photo: pixabay.com/TyliJura continued...
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