A multi-national financial services company (the “Firm”) with tens of thousands of employees and assets in the tens of billions, had decided to move away from Citrix, abandon its data centers, and adopt Microsoft Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD). “With Citrix,” explained the Firm’s Senior Engineer for app and desktop virtualization (the “Engineer”), “we had a very large global environment that was very difficult to manage. We were looking for a better way of doing things.”
The Firm’s Microsoft rep suggested exploring Nerdio for AVD management. “They’re doing great stuff,” the Microsoft rep had said.
“We had never heard of Nerdio,” admitted the Engineer. “That was our first concern. We were on a call with Nerdio’s President and CEO, and asked him outright, ‘Are you an enterprise-ready application?’ And he said, ‘Yes, we are.’ And I said, ‘Tell me what that means to you.’ And he replied, ‘Well, we already have a college that has 100,000 desktops deployed.’ That told me they were an enterprise-ready organization. If you’ve got 100,000 desktops, that’s more than we’ll ever deploy.”
Proof of value
A long proof-of-concept verified the Microsoft rep’s point. “It was clear,” the Engineer said, “that they were thinking about how to make this easier.” That had not been the case with Citrix.
“We had approached Citrix multiple times,” the Engineer continued, “and Citrix was saying, ‘Yeah, we’re going to get to that. We’re going to do that.’ And it never happened. They weren’t listening to us. With Nerdio, if we saw that something could be better with this or that modification, within two weeks, they were turning those ideas into the app and putting them back into the application for us to try out. They were turning them around so rapidly that we knew that they were going to be responsive to us, and that remains the case to this day.”
Radical simplification
The Firm leverages AVD significantly in Asia, where they have a workforce in the thousands. “In someplace like India, Nerdio allows us to deliver a standardized desktop at a reduced cost,” the Engineer explained. “Rather than shipping everyone a dedicated laptop that has all the applications they need, we can deliver, for instance, 50 desktops that will be used by upwards of 1,000 people. And those 50 desktops are a lot easier to manage than 1,000 individual laptops. And they’re contained inside Azure. So, they’re secure. They’re not out in the wild, like a laptop would be. That’s the advantage.”
Nerdio also automates some of the most arduous AVD management tasks. For instance, Nerdio automatically downloads the latest image from Microsoft every month and performs scripted actions that walk through the step-by-step installation for over thirty different applications on the Firm’s base images.
“Once that’s done,” the Engineer added, “we just have somebody to go in and do some checks to ensure everything installed as we expected. Then we promote it from a test image into a production image. And that’s it.”
100% ROI
With Nerdio, the Firm has netted up to 97% time savings in addition to cost savings associated with hardware and management. “With Citrix,” the Engineer said, “it took one engineer the better part of two weeks out of every month to prep the images, pre-stage them, and deploy them. Someone like me would spend two weeks just doing that. Now that we’re well into Nerdio, we spend two to four hours per month. If an engineer is freed up by 77 hours a month, that’s time you can spend doing something else. We have multiple engineers saving significant amounts of time.”
Nerdio has also allowed the Firm to minimize headcount. A support team of six handles the day-to-day management of hundreds of host pools and 16,000 users. The Engineer estimates that Nerdio can save them millions per year. “It easily pays for itself,” he said. “And it’s easy to sell to management. It’s not something we have to argue with the company about purchasing each year. We say, ‘Here’s the bill and here are the savings.’”
Even with all the current savings, the Engineer expects Nerdio’s value to increase. “Just look at all these things that Nerdio has introduced in the last six months,” he enthused. “There’s so much stuff they’ve built into the application that we haven’t yet leveraged that can save us more money, that can create a better user experience and a build a better admin experience. The innovation just never stops.”
To learn more about how a multi-national financial services firm is cost-effectively overcoming Microsoft Virtual Desktop management challenges with Nerdio, download the full case study PDF below.
