Customer Stories
Customer story
70 %
Compute savings after enabling Nerdio Auto-Scaling.
12
Hours to minutes—onboarding time reduced across client environments.
25
Customer environments and 439 AVD users now managed seamlessly.
Ready to get started?
Start nowChallenge
- Legacy on-premises RDS environments caused high costs, downtime risk, and maintenance strain.
- Manual scaling and patching slowed delivery and inflated cloud spend.
- Customers needed modern, flexible desktops that met remote work and performance expectations.
Solution
- Leveraged Microsoft’s Data Center Optimization (DCO) program and Nerdio Manager for MSP to modernize from RDS to AVD.
- Used Nerdio’s automation and Auto-Scaling to streamline onboarding, policy management, and session host lifecycle operations.
- Adopted Windows 11 and AVD elasticity for improved end-user performance and cost alignment across customer environments.
Overview
Ntiva is a U.S.-based managed IT services provider that helps organizations accelerate growth and productivity through secure, scalable technology solutions, from cloud and cybersecurity to strategic IT consulting and 24/7 support.
A key part of that mission is delivering secure, reliable desktop experiences to hundreds of clients and thousands of end users, ensuring employees can work seamlessly from anywhere.
As more organizations move their IT infrastructures to the cloud, the way desktops are delivered must evolve as well. Ntiva has experienced this shift firsthand, supporting clients whose employees need to log in securely from anywhere, move between systems without disruption, and scale usage efficiently.
To meet changing customer needs, Ntiva chose to leverage Microsoft Datacenter Optimization (DCO) and Nerdio to deliver secure, scalable virtual desktop environments that align performance, cost, and user experience. By combining modern desktop delivery with flexible cloud infrastructure, Ntiva ensures every user experience is fast, reliable, and rightsized for each business.
Historically, many of Ntiva’s client environments still sat on carefully maintained on-premises Remote Desktop Services (RDS) farms. They worked, but the model no longer matched the moment: costs crept up, maintenance swallowed weekends, and every upgrade felt like surgery on a system that couldn’t stop breathing. Ntiva needed a cloud rhythm.
When fixed infrastructure met a fluid workday
There wasn’t just a single major outage, but friction was steadily piling up. Patching collided with business hours. Tickets spiked when afternoon concurrency rose. Adding users meant adding hosts that idled overnight. And building for peaks meant paying for waste the rest of the time.
Azure Virtual Desktop promised a better fit. Moving users from a server desktop to Windows 11 gave end users the experience they wanted and made line-of-business app compatibility easier. Plus, it gave operations a path to elasticity that maps to the workday. At this point, Chris Murray, Ntiva’s Director of Product Management, stepped in to turn the mandate into a motion.
A program with lift and the operating model to match: Microsoft DCO + Nerdio
Ntiva entered Microsoft’s Data Center Optimization program, a structured way to move from on‑premises RDS to AVD with Microsoft support. Already working with Nerdio on AVD for a couple of years, Ntiva accelerated its modernization under Microsoft’s DCO program and deepened its use of Nerdio because of the operational wins it delivered and the Microsoft partnership.
DCO provided structure and momentum, AVD delivered the Windows 11 experience users expected, and Nerdio supplied the powerful operating model—policy-driven automation for image hygiene, updates, app deployment, and session host lifecycle—so the estate runs cleanly across many customer environments without heroics.
Proof you can feel in minutes and dollars
“If you have an AVD and you don’t have Nerdio, you are throwing away money,” said Chris. In practice, the time savings show up first. Onboarding a new environment into Nerdio takes less than an hour, often minutes, and the same approach scales to dozens or even hundreds of accounts because the steps don’t change when the logo does. When a host misbehaves, Chris says the team doesn’t nurse it back to health: “With Nerdio, we don’t fix problems. You throw the bad host away and replace it with a new one automatically, so incidents don’t linger, and users don’t notice”. And when Nerdio Auto-Scaling aligns capacity with real usage, the Azure bill reflects reality: Across estates, Ntiva routinely sees 40%–70% compute savings after automation is enabled.
All of the cost savings, that's of course where we can see the benefit. With Nerdio Auto-Scale, AVD is now 60%, 70% cheaper. We simply add the Nerdio automation on top, and the Azure bill drops.”
Chris Murray,
Director of Product Management, Ntiva
The moment the numbers started telling the story
Today, Ntiva manages 25 customer environments with Nerdio and supports 439 active AVD users. After cutover, capacity finally matches demand instead of guesses, and costs fall accordingly. Time follows the same curve: Work that once took up to twelve hours—onboarding, image rollouts, repeatable project steps—now takes minutes with Nerdio. The service desk feels the difference. There are fewer fire drills, more forward progress on application experience, and greater stability.
“A project that maybe took 8, 10, 12 hours is taking maybe 8, 10, 12 minutes with Nerdio.” — Chris Murray, Director of Product Management, Ntiva
Looking ahead
With Microsoft’s Data Center Optimization program as the catalyst and Nerdio as the operating layer, Ntiva will continue guiding customers from on-premises RDS to AVD—standardizing delivery, shrinking waste, and trading weekend maintenance for automation that doesn’t get tired. The outcome is clear: fewer surprises for IT, measurable savings for finance, and a faster, calmer Windows 11 desktop for the people who rely on it every day.
