Workspot Conversations with Customers: Gain a Competitive Edge with Cloud VDI
It has been a busy week! Among video shoots and other activities, I hosted two webinars this week along with Microsoft and two joint customers. Both webinars are available on-demand, so if you missed the live conversations, you can watch them at your convenience. We learned some new things, and I bet you will too!
Watch now: Law Firm Poyner Spruill’s cloud-first strategy lead them to insanely simple Workspot cloud VDI and a competitive advantage.
Watch now: Engineering and architectural firm Mead & Hunt made the journey from physical workstations to legacy VDI and then implemented Workspot cloud workstations.
What’s so Different About Cloud VDI?
Our patent-pending Global Desktop Fabric™ enables massive innovation for our customers. You can read more about it in this blog. Here are a few discussion highlights this week from our webinars and 1-1 customer conversations:
Performance
As we have watched our customers move on from physical PCs and workstations and legacy VDI to cloud VDI, we’ve seen some amazing transformations. One of the most gratifying results we hear is how much end users appreciate Workspot. The reason it’s so notable for us is that most of us have lived through the performance pain of legacy VDI. CIO Ellen Kinsinger of Poyner Spruill mentioned that “Everybody has a really positive attitude about Workspot, and they really appreciate it.” They saw significant improvement in performance for their attorneys and staff using cloud desktops. Earlier this week a cloud workstation power-user at another customer emailed this: “My experience using Workspot the past couple of weeks was that everything was faster! All this has kept my work on track, kept my attention on track, made work more fun, and I wanted to say THANK YOU! I think this is a big improvement for our team.” It doesn’t get much better than that! And of course, CIO Andy Knauf was quoted months ago saying “We’re seeing ridiculous speed with Workspot on Azure.” I love that quote because Andy has very demanding CAD engineers using Workspot, and they will not compromise on performance. Watch our latest webinar with Andy, so you can see Chris Le bouncing around from NScape to Revit to AutoCAD (plus email and other business apps) – no loss of feedback, no lag. At the office Chris as 3 monitors, and at home he has two monitors, and while traveling he uses a pretty basic laptop. “Workspot works fluidly across any of these situations and automatically repositions everything each time for different devices,” Chris says. “Even when I was sitting in a hotel with limited connectivity I was able to run AutoCAD and Revit just fine.” Similarly, Andy is loving his Microsoft SurfaceGo with his Workspot persistent cloud workstation and Revit, and he’ll show you why!
Botton line? Today, outstanding performance is a gating item for the success of the pilots we do; no one is going back to the old days of painful latency and lower productivity.
Security and Availability
One of the primary reasons many companies tried legacy VDI was to better secure apps and data – it was all centralized in the data center rather than living on a bunch of risky endpoints. Turns out though, that as bad actors get more sophisticated, protecting on-prem data centers gets tougher. And the tradeoff of better security, for lower productivity just didn’t cut it. When you look at the investments Microsoft has made in Azure security, it is phenomenally impressive, and let’s face it, it would be tough for an in-house IT team to match those capabilities. That’s why so many CIOs now feel confident about their cloud-first strategies, and why desktop workloads are one of the first (and most strategic) to be moved over to the cloud. Workspot’s cloud-native architecture has a security layer in addition to the security provided by Azure – that no other vendor has. Definitley drill down on this with us and other vendors you evaluate for cloud desktop solutions. Along with Workspot’s 99.95% cloud desktop service uptime, it’s easy for IT teams to feel confident about our capabilities. At Poyner Spruill, they believe that “The cloud approach secures our data better.” Now that performance issues are history and you get better security, availability, reliability (and maybe IT folks get their lives back?) it’s time to make the move to cloud VDI.
Your Best Growth Tool
One of the notable takeaways from our discussion with CIO Ellen Kinsinger is that the firm views the move to cloud desktops as helping them achieve a competitive advantage. They already have a global presence, but cloud desktops allow them to easily spin up new desktops as they grow, or if they need to support contract attorneys, or if someone in the firm needs to travel to a client anywhere in the world, their cloud desktop is right there, ready to go – on any device. Ellen views this kind of flexibility as a strong argument for going all-in on cloud desktops. Similarly, Mead&Hunt can pursue new projects anywhere in the world, because they don’t have to set up expensive branch offices near the client. They hire the right people anywhere in the world, and off they go. CEOs and CIOs see expansion into new geographies as a key growth enabler; if you agree, it’s time to talk to Workspot, because you can’t achieve the kind of agility and performance you need to expand globally with physical desktops or with legacy VDI. With Workspot you can, and that’s how you gain that competitive advantage.
Business Continuity
Business continuity and disaster recovery are certainly top of mind for every CIO. Both Ellen and Andy talked about having faced business continuity events. For Mead&Hunt, a hurricane threatened one of their offices, and once they made sure everyone was safe, some people were ready to get back to work, and they were able to do that from home and from Starbucks. With Workspot’s built-in disaster recovery, both organizations feel better prepared to quickly get back to work (no office needed!) in the event that a disaster strikes. Ellen says, “We are much better prepared for a business continuity event with the built-in disaster recovery capabilities of cloud desktops.”
There are so many more things to tell you! You really should watch the webinars to get the full perspective from our customers: CIO Ellen along with Cloud Architect Dale talking about the business use cases for their law firm, and CIO Andy and BIM power user Chris showing what’s possible with cloud workstations for architecture, engineering and construction firms.
Enjoy! When you’re ready, let’s talk about your unique use cases and how Workspot can help. Schedule a demo!
