Shepley Bulfinch
Shepley Bulfinch scales remote design capabilities with Nerdio and Azure Virtual Desktop
National architecture firm enables flexible remote work, streamlines image deployment, and optimizes cloud costs with Nerdio Manager for Enterprise.
Shepley Bulfinch, one of the nation’s oldest and most respected architectural firms, designs complex structures for healthcare and higher education institutions—including Harvard University, University of Houston, and Boston Children’s Hospital. To support their distributed design teams working on massive 3D models and resource-intensive applications, the firm needed a high-performance, cloud-based virtual desktop environment. ments, automate workflows, and reduce cloud costs for its clients. That’s where Nerdio came in.
David Caruso, the firm’s IT lead on the project, spearheaded the shift to Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) and quickly discovered that while AVD delivered powerful remote compute capabilities, managing the environment at scale required more visibility, automation, and ease of use. That’s when Shepley Bulfinch turned to Nerdio.
“We have designers and architects using Autodesk Revit, Enscape, Rhino—really compute-heavy tools. AVD gave us the flexibility to work remotely, but Nerdio gave us the automation and control to manage it efficiently.” — David Caruso, IT lead, Shepley Bulfinch
From high-powered laptops to cloud-based workstations
Before the cloud transition, most employees relied on high-performance laptops in the office, accessing resources remotely via VPN and traditional desktop connections. But as the pandemic accelerated remote work, Shepley Bulfinch needed a more scalable, centralized solution to support their highly technical workforce from anywhere.
After an initial proof of concept with Azure Virtual Desktop, the team moved forward—but managing workloads and user experience directly through Azure quickly proved difficult.
Nerdio delivers simplicity, performance, and cost optimization
Caruso had heard about Nerdio early on and revisited the solution after the AVD rollout proved successful but cumbersome to manage. After installing Nerdio Manager for Enterprise from the Azure Marketplace, the firm was up and running in minutes. Through Nerdio, Shepley Bulfinch gained the ability to:
- Automate and simplify image creation and deployment
- Empower non-Azure experts to manage sessions and monitor performance
- Drastically reduce cloud costs through intelligent auto-scaling
Empowering IT to support 140+ designers with ease
With 140+ users accessing AVD daily—including architects spinning 3D models and rendering environments—performance is non-negotiable. Nerdio not only helped deliver that performance but made it easier to monitor, optimize, and respond in real time.
One of the biggest wins? Visualizing cost and performance trends through Nerdio’s dashboards.
“Now I have a perfect curve where user connections match available machines. Leadership can actually see how efficient we are with spend—and that’s powerful.”
The team also reduced time spent on image refreshes from quarterly to bi-weekly, thanks to Nerdio’s intuitive reimaging and application deployment workflows.
Trusted partnership and proactive support
As a lean IT team, Shepley Bulfinch values Nerdio’s responsive, engineering-driven support.
The future: Scaling smart and focusing on strategic projects
By offloading the complexity of managing AVD and endpoint images to Nerdio, Caruso and his team have more time to focus on innovation and future-proofing their environment.
Whether it’s streamlining costs or improving the end-user experience, Nerdio’s automation-first approach aligns perfectly with Shepley Bulfinch’s culture of design excellence and operational efficiency.