Last month, I had the opportunity to attend the inaugural NerdioCon conference, where I was invited to share my Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) experiences with Nedio CEO, Vadim Vladimirskiy, in his opening keynote speech. It was a great conference and wonderful to finally meet the Nerdio team in person. I have been impressed by Nerdio from the very beginning, at the heart of their company lives VALUE, and that is something I have always been passionate about.
I will explain more below, but first a little context. cubesys has been helping enterprises realise the potential of their Microsoft investment for almost 9 years. It is exceedingly rare we resell a product, what we do is leverage a client’s current investment to help them get the most out of it and for us, that is predominately Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365.
Changing the game with Nerdio AVD Manager
Almost two years ago now, Microsoft launched Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) and for the first time made Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) a first-class citizen in the cloud. Having had over 20 years of experience with VDI solutions, I immediately realised what a game changer this technology was, in fact I should probably write another article summarising why it is such a quantum shift for VDI – CIO’s & IT managers everywhere need to know the benefits AVD has released to us, it is a lot more than you think.
AVD also sat at the intersection of cubesys’ talents, and we became an early adopter. We were the first Australian company to achieve Microsoft’s coveted Advanced Specialization for AVD and have delivered 40+ AVD projects to date; we have gained lots of experience.
So why our change of heart at cubesys? Why are we so supportive of Nerdio and happy to resell their software? It can be summed up in one word – VALUE.
Quite simply AVD is better for our clients with Nerdio than without. Our clients are better off commercially, operational and the end-user gets a better experience.
Let me quantify where I see the VALUE for you and see if you agree.
Commercial Model
Let’s talk about the price and the contract. Nerdio is based on a ‘Monthly-Active-User’ model, which means, if one of your users logs on to AVD in any given calendar month they are charged, if they don’t use it, then there is no fee. This strikes me as eminently fair and more appropriate to modern cloud deployments than traditional VDI charging models. The contract is a monthly subscription, so if you are ever compelled to remove Nerdio there is no penalty, and as I will explain below, technically this is very simply, so again NO lock-in tactics. The price is $3 USD per user, per month – the cost of a coffee.
Our experience at cubesys is that clients see a ROI (Return on Investment) within 10 days of implementing Nerdio. Meaning is it paying for itself by day 10, EVERY MONTH. We have a great demo to show you how.
Architecture
I really like the Nerdio Architecture, it’s how I would have designed it. Its uses modern cloud components to achieve a light-weight footprint, minimising costs, and operational overheads.
Nerdio sits in the AVD technology stack to add value, not replace the global AVD services already provided my Microsoft Azure. This means it can be added or removed without impacting your AVD environment, uninstall it and AVD keeps running.
What Nerdio does is provide advanced automation, auto-repair capabilities, wonderful image management tools, enhanced monitoring and more … I spent many years as a systems engineer and my reaction was ‘that’s cool’.
cubesys have an upcoming series of AVD focused webinars, you will find out much more there. REGISTER HERE
Innovation
Nerdio also fits into to that rare breed of software companies that achieve value through constant innovation. I first experienced this while jointly demonstrating Nerdio to a client. During the conversation one of my team made an observation, the typical ‘wouldn’t it be nice if…’
About two weeks later I saw a LinkedIn post highlighting a new Nerdio feature. The team at Nerdio had not just heard a request, they had listened, seen the value, and implemented it. And this didn’t happen just once, over the coming months it happened again and again … my team even had a little fun making suggestions and seeing how long it would take to make it into the product. I learnt at the conference that in the last year the team at Nerdio had been listening hard, they released 180 new features … that is one every two days – awesome work!
Culture
Finally, maybe the most valuable part of Nerdio is the intangible one. The value of Nerdio’s culture. They are a pleasure to work with, nothing is ever too much trouble, they listen and care. There is genuine excitement for the technology, for the intricate details, for the engineering excellence. This almost ‘school-boy’ excitement for what they are doing provides a fertile ground for innovation. But there is also maturity, derived from over a decade of real-world experience, Nerdio is fully aware of the impact they are having and how they enhance Microsoft’s AVD stack. The product is built for enterprise and stands-up to the demands of enterprise deployments.
Ultimately, any VDI solutions is all about the end-user successfully accessing the applications and data they need in a productive manner. At cubesys we have built ‘Clinical Desktops’ for frontline Healthcare workers, corporate SOE’s for secure remote workers, Developer Desktops, GPU intensive desktops for engineers using CAD software and high-end compute for specialist Scientist workloads, AVD is changing how we view VDI solutions and where we apply them in our businesses. Nerdio make all this so much easier to achieve.
Thanks, Nerdio – keep up the magnificent work.
And Dave Wymer, thanks for the recommendation.
Paul Heaton
Co-Founder and CEO, cubesys
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