22 01732 759725 good reason to adopt VDI, along with its performance and cost-effectiveness. Technology Reseller: What are your plans for 2025? 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 to build on what we’ve done so far and to push into some new areas. www.inevidesk.com 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. Technology Reseller: 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 We’re starting to see an appetite for alternatives, which is really healthy, 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. Technology Reseller: 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 INTERVIEW ...continued Spreading the word How MSPs are helping Inevidesk reach new markets Technology Reseller: When did Inevidesk start selling through the channel? Tim Whiteley (TW): We started last year after a number of MSPs and distributors we had been speaking to expressed an interest in reselling the service. We’d been trading for three and a half to four years by that point and they could see we weren’t a flash in the pan. They could see we were getting more clients and better-known clients as well, including some of the largest architects in the UK who trust us enough to put their data and operations in our hands. Direct Sales is hard work and trying to get through to organisations that don’t already know you takes a lot of time and effort. We could employ a large sales team to do that, but channel partners have those relationships already, so we think that is a much better route to go down. Technology Reseller: How many reseller partners do you have now and how can they help boost VDI adoption? TW: We have six partners so far. A couple are AEC specialists, but others deal with a wider customer base. Scan, for example, is one of the biggest technology distributors in the UK and now markets our service as their in-house hosted VDI solution. One of the things we want to do over the next six to 12 months is talk to more organisations and more partners outside the AEC industry. VDI is growing but in certain sectors it has a bad reputation because it never really delivered on performance, it was expensive and there were problems with downtime and outages. And that’s still happening. Not all VDI services are the same and not all will necessarily be right for what the customer wants to do. Channel partners should use their knowledge of the range of options available to ensure they put appropriate solutions in front of customers and don’t just default to Microsoft Azure, which we’ve seen happen a few times. The biggest challenges we face are awareness around what VDI is and does and recognition that what we offer is not the same as what a customer may have looked at a couple of years ago or heard stories about. We are something quite different and that’s what we’re trying to get across to channel partners as well: we’re not like anything else you’ll be offering. Technology Reseller: What opportunities are there for channel partners to generate additional revenue from your solution? TW: We just offer the virtual desktop platform and, if you’re hosted with us, virtual desktop and Infrastructure as a Service – a whole hosted platform. We don’t manage the customer’s Windows servers. We don’t manage their security. We don’t manage any software. We don’t resell any other software. So we don’t take any custom away from channel partners that they would otherwise be making money on. We’re not interested in becoming a onestop‑shop for everything. We want to concentrate on what we do and make sure we do it really well. Then, it’s up to channel partners to build it in as they see fit. They can package it up as something much more comprehensive or they can just sell it as it is. That’s the flexibility we offer channel partners. Technology Reseller: Have you had to develop a particular portal for MSPs, giving them one place to manage all their clients? TW: That’s designed into the system. The ability to set different permissions means we can restrict somebody to looking after just one organisation or create an umbrella organisation where an MSP can see and manage all of its clients. We’re now working on the ability for them to brand the control panel with their own colours and add their own logo. We’re building in things like that all the time, and we’re talking to partners and prospective partners to see what they’d like and trying to iterate quickly and be really responsive to their needs.
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