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How OWG Grew Its Azure Practice 10x and Found Power in Partnership with Nerdio

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Managed Service Provider (MSP) OWG, based in Los Angeles and New York/New Jersey, was created to take a new approach to the industry and offer emerging technologies and innovative IT strategies to clients around the globe. Working with organizations across the healthcare, pharmaceutical, entertainment, and medical devices sectors, OWG constantly encountered clients still on legacy systems that simply weren’t as scalable, flexible, or secure as they needed to be.

“We knew there had to be a better way to serve these clients while both delivering the vertical-specific line of business applications necessary to operate and efficiently managing those workloads,” said Nick Rigali, Operating Partner, OWG. “We started with no assumptions and a lot of curiosity and quickly found Azure Virtual Desktop was the best way to deliver those services.”

From Breakout Session to Breakthrough

OWG started deploying Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), Windows Virtual Desktop at the time, with Nerdio in 2019 following an eye-opening breakout session by Nerdio CEO and co-founder Vadim Vladimirskiy at Microsoft Inspire, the Redmond giant’s global partner conference.

“After hearing about Nerdio’s capabilities, it felt like they had heard all the concerns we had with Microsoft’s remote desktop offering and addressed them to a tee,” said Brandon Marks, Managing Partner, OWG. “After a few test migrations, we immediately saw the power of combining AVD with Nerdio and were able to move 100 percent of client workloads in the data center to Azure in no time.”

With Nerdio Manager for MSP, OWG’s AVD deployments are now 2-3 times faster, saving hundreds of hours across dozens of deployments. The process evolved from taking days doing extensive, manual foundational work with heavy PowerShell scripting, to just a few clicks.

“Nerdio Manager does all the grunt work for us,” said Rigali. “Rather than writing a script, pushing the script, fixing the errors, and trying again, we can now fire off a script and it takes 30 seconds to a minute. The platform truly pays for itself in the efficiency it provides.”

During the pandemic, this functionality was particularly vital to the OWG team as they helped clients migrate to a hybrid environment for remote work. Nerdio Manager for MSP enabled OWG to easily and more quickly support those environments while providing customers with the same user experience, better scalability, and convenience to connect easily from any device.  

Flexibility for Modern Businesses

In today’s unpredictable economic landscape, flexibility is crucial to the success of any business. With Nerdio Manager, OWG is able to design customized environments for each unique client and their vertical, while still leveraging the platform’s automation and orchestration features. This simplifies matters for MSP and client alike while still providing bespoke functionality that heavily regulated industries demand.

For instance, OWG clients in the accounting and financial services space encounter a lot of consolidation and M&A that require extensive flexibility within their infrastructure for rapidly absorbing other accounts, systems, and services from all around the world. OWG is not only able to easily support these deployments with Nerdio, but is also able to give clients access to their own environments with granular permissions, so even those employees without Azure training can make small updates in real time.

“Agility and flexibility are incredibly important to our clients – particularly when it comes to compute,” added Rigali. “They have staff all over the world, logging in at different times and they need to scale accordingly. Nerdio Manager for MSP allows us to design each client’s auto-scaling around their day-to-day workflow patterns and save them thousands of dollars a year.”

Security & Compliance in the Healthcare Sector

An OWG client in the healthcare space was facing challenges from a scaling perspective but also needed to meet strict HIPAA compliance and security regulations. They were running on really dated, legacy systems and were in desperate need of a refresh.

“We initially had conversions about replacing servers and improving security, but that just didn’t make sense when I knew I could move them to an Azure environment that ticked all the boxes from a compliance and security standpoint,” noted Rigali. “With Nerdio Manager, the healthcare organization now has a new environment that’s highly secure and optimized specifically for their legacy system.”

The addition of Nerdio Manager for MSP has enabled the client to drive growth across the business as their new security protocols now qualify them to be doing work with major hospital systems all over the country.

Further, the company is currently outsourcing some work to a team in India, and OWG can add another pool for that group of users, set up autoscaling rules, establish time-based rules for that time zone, etc. And if they need to quickly start a new project with a hospital, in a couple of clicks OWG can spin up access.

This has been a true game changer for the client as they are able to continue to focus on innovation and sales, and leave the IT to OWG and Nerdio.

More Than a Tool

However, Nerdio’s impact extends far beyond the technology itself, and they have established themselves as a one-of-a-kind vendor partner for OWG.

“Nerdio is not just the most important tool in our stack, but it’s also our most important vendor relationship to date,” stated Marks. “A lot of the software providers we work with don’t take the time to understand our business and how the tools we use affect both our interactions with our own staff and our clients. The team at Nerdio has been unprecedentedly collaborative and have truly given us a seat at the table.”

Not only does OWG always feel heard in conversations with Nerdio, but the team is consistently amazed by the speed at which Nerdio implements their feedback and creates new features.

“The non-stop development we see coming from Nerdio is rare in this industry,” Rigali added. “It seems like we see new features coming down the pike every week, three or four of which were exactly what we asked for and need to deliver the ultimate customer experience. Other vendors feel like they’re always trying to sell us something; with Nerdio they’re trying to help us improve our practice.”

Nerdio is constantly looking for partner feedback and eager to share best practices on how to control costs and optimize environments. This makes OWG staff more efficient and effective at providing support to their clients.

This constant communication loop has fostered a strong relationship that, in turn, has generated a lot of new business opportunities for OWG. Since implementing Nerdio Manager for MSP, OWG has expanded its Azure practice by at least 10x and is on track to close a million dollars in revenue for 2023 from Nerdio accounts alone.

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