With major markets in France, Great Britain, and Belgium, Groupe Damartex comprises eight brands in areas ranging from fashion to home décor to healthcare, all aimed at the 55+ market.
Damart, their largest brand, had been using Citrix, but during a major systems update, the company considered switching to Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) to fill unmet needs. As a proof of concept, they began using AVD for certain desktop environments. However, Azure alone was not providing the capabilities or performance Damart sought.
“We quickly saw a gap between AVD and Citrix in terms of management features,” said Romain Dupont, Digital Workplace Manager at Damart. “It was clear that it would take ages to do the things that took much less time with Citrix. That’s when our partner ROXYS suggested we look at Nerdio Manager for AVD management and supported us on definition, architecture, deployment, and support. Adding Nerdio brought a lot of value compared to AVD alone. It fills the gap in terms of features and capabilities.”
The missing pieces Nerdio provides include ease of management and administration, improved scalability, and provisioning on-demand. “It also gives us insights on the savings we gain using the scalability features,” Dupont added.
Savings on compute and resources
Dupont found Nerdio easy to implement, and adoption was quick. “We onboarded Nerdio, and we were able to create a production environment to meet our requirements in a month, maybe less,” he noted. “We have put AVD with Nerdio Manager into production in five different areas of the business.” AVD plus Nerdio, he said, “is very close to Citrix in terms of features, but much more cost-effective and easier to manage.”
Through using AVD with Nerdio Manager, Damart saves approximately 50% on licensing costs and 50% on labor and resourcing costs. Nerdio Manager’s Auto-Scaling has also resulted in significant cost savings. “The scaling features in Nerdio allow us to fine-tune when to turn on and turn off resources,” Dupont explained. “We can scale up and down instantly. I can adapt depending on the business requirement and the business uses.” Nerdio Manager’s Auto-Scaling is the source of their significant compute cost savings.
As a mid-sized organization with an IT department of about 100, Damart does not have the resources to dedicate FTEs to managing individual pieces of software. “It saves a lot of administrative time,” Dupont stated. “If we were using AVD without Nerdio Manager, I think we’d need at least one or perhaps two additional employees. We’d need to recruit staff to manage it full-time.”
Dupont was excited to see that Nerdio was named Microsoft Partner of the Year for 2024. “That’s a very significant distinction,” he muses, “and I’m interested in seeing what they’ll be able to bring to the table to even further differentiate themselves from the competition and make AVD more valuable.”
Ready to see how Nerdio can help your organization simplify IT operations and reduce costs? Book a demo today.
