Asda

In 2021, the Issa brothers purchased Asda, one of Britain’s largest supermarket chains, from Walmart. The ambitious new owners wanted to scale the chain rapidly and expand into convenience stores. 

To scale to the degree the Issa brothers envisioned, Asda would need to digitally transform its on-premises infrastructure to be cloud-native and implement a new, dynamic VDI solution. At the same time, the business was looking for ways to reduce the cost of the transformation.

Initial considerations

For VDI, an Asda senior engineer (the “Engineer”) first considered VMware Horizon Cloud, but the rigidity of licensing and costs were prohibitive. He then learned Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) was included in Asda’s existing MVP Solution, and the answer became obvious.

With AVD, the up-front cost savings compared to VMware were immense, but Asda’s environment was enormous and complex. IT leadership knew an AVD environment would require a lot of hands-on attention and a tool that could enhance the AVD platform features to simplify its management.

“The AVD platform hadn’t matured enough, and we struggled with a lack of Azure-specific expertise,” the Engineer confessed. “From a functionality perspective, I thought it would be impossible to do what I had been tasked with using native AVD.” 

Checking out Nerdio

Nerdio Manager for Enterprise ticked all the boxes for the Engineer, “When I pitched Nerdio to leadership, I said, ‘Look, you could pay thousands of pounds to hire additional engineers to manage AVD natively, or I can pay $7 per license per user for a tool that will do it all for us.’ It was a quick ‘yes’ from there.”

As Asda began onboarding, a typically complex process, Nerdio made the journey as simple as possible and integrated seamlessly with Azure. 

“Onboarding Nerdio was probably the easiest thing I’ve done in my career,” the Engineer remarked. “Once we configured everything properly on our end, deployments were literally—click, click, click—one pool at a time, and we wrapped up in a couple of hours.” 

One-stop shopping with Nerdio

With Nerdio up and running, The Asda IT team immediately saw the effects with countless hours saved from unnecessary administrative work.

Customizing Scripted Actions to Asda’s specifications, they were able to streamline everything from scheduling to image management. Additionally, automated security updates removed the risk of human error, improving both performance and security across the organization.

With a goal to find significant areas of cost savings, it was Nerdio’s Auto-Scaling feature that really stood out for the IT team. Since they could eliminate sessions not in use, Asda was only paying for the resources consumed, generating massive savings for the company.

Price check

Asda’s IT team has been able to add resources and scale while reducing department costs. In fact, over the span of two years, Asda easily went from managing around 400 machines to more than 5,000 dedicated desktops with Nerdio. The company now has anywhere between 6,000-7,000 monthly users with over 3,000 concurrent licenses, making it one of the largest deployments in the UK.

“Above all, for me, the best part about Nerdio is that it just works!” exclaimed the Engineer. “We’ve been using Nerdio for two years, and I’ve never had a problem. I don’t have to fix it—I barely have to touch it. In fact, the only time I log into Nerdio is to do a new deployment or to do a quick update on the platform. This is what makes Nerdio a true game changer.”

At the end of its digital transformation, Asda now has a cloud-native VDI solution using Azure Virtual Desktop with Nerdio. The company has achieved its IT goals, scaling for rapid growth and seeing savings of upwards of £56,000 a month.

Ready to see how Nerdio can help your organization simplify IT operations and reduce costs? Book a demo today.