How Does Workspot Work? Cloud PCs are the New DaaS.
While every employee lives our customer-first philosophy, it’s our Customer Success Team that executes all the many moving parts of onboarding a new customer, and they are impressive! Today I want to walk you through some details about what your initial journey with Workspot looks – and feels like.
Starting Where You Are
Once you’ve decided to move forward with a Workspot Cloud PC deployment, a transition occurs from the pre-sales team to our Customer Success Team. An internal meeting is held to transfer everything the sales team has learned about what is most important for your success. Organizations come to us in varying states of readiness for their Cloud PC deployment. No matter where you’re starting, we’re ready.
Next we’ll hold your initial kickoff meeting, when you’ll meet your assigned Customer Success Program Manager and Customer Success Engineer. While these two people are dedicated to your project, there are many more experts on the Workspot extended team, each with deep cloud and virtual desktop experience, surrounding them and helping to support your deployment. You’ll also designate your Cloud PC project team and they will collaborate closely with the Workspot team.
Kickoff: Explore and Define Requirements
- Examine your existing end user computing environment and requirements and identify risks
- Discuss your key use cases and their value to your organization
- Map use cases to licenses/configurations
From there, the Workspot team develops the architecture for your solution. Once this foundation is solid, the deployment process begins.
How Fast Can You Deploy Cloud PCs?
Many of us came from the legacy on-premises VDI world, so every time we get a new customer up and running in a weekend, or we deploy across multiple cloud regions with end users across the globe enjoying their new Cloud PCs in a few days, it continues to impress (at least me!). The Customer Success Team is so good at getting new customers live and productive that sometimes I don’t think they give themselves enough credit. This is not your Father’s virtual desktop solution! On-prem, old-school VDI takes months and months to deploy, so the contrast is dramatic.
How fast your Workspot Cloud PC rollout can go depends primarily on your readiness, and we’re here to help. At this point in the deployment process a timeline has been established and the project team identified. You’ll be participating in a 30 minute weekly meeting (or more often if needed) with our team to help you complete the required tasks on your side, including any networking and security-related tasks.
Implementation Gets Underway!
- We review and configure your public cloud instance
- We work together to prepare and customize your templates
- Training on Workspot Control begins and continues throughout the deployment
- We work together to provision your Cloud PCs, workstations and apps
- We help you onboard your users
We’re getting close to going live!
End User Experience is Everything
Many of you have been down this road: IT deploys a new enterprise application, end users hate it, and they resist it every step of the way. In the context of legacy virtual desktops, end users who are remote from the data center, whether in a branch office or working from home, always suffer from the impact of latency. Latency kills productivity because app performance is slow. One prospect we talked with recently who has on-premises VDI asked us “is a 45-minute login time normal?” Yikes. Sadly it often is.
That’s why a critical milestone in our deployment process is User Acceptance Testing (UAT). While we can get your deployment done in a few days, it’s important to have an adequate UAT period (and we recommend selecting your most demanding end users for this stage!) so we can make sure their experience is great. UAT is important for many reasons, but truly, when skeptical end users try their Workspot Cloud PCs and workstations, they get really excited about them because the performance is so outstanding – and that sure makes IT’s job easier when we’re ready for your Cloud PC rollout. Adoption happens naturally when people are excited about performance and the freedom their Cloud PCs and workstations provide.
Final Testing
- Conduct UAT
- Test solution against use cases
- Confirm test results against success criteria
Time to Go Live!
We recently took a new customer live – from inquiry to production Cloud PCs – in a weekend. It’s not the first time and it won’t be the last. That’s a tribute to our innovative SaaS platform, but it is also the manifestation of our customer commitment that made that happen. However you engage with Workspot initially, our mission is to deliver value as fast as possible, so you’ll always know what’s needed and who owns the action as you move through your Workspot deployment journey. As we get ready to take your Cloud PCs into production, you’ll meet a few new “Workspotters” who take you into production and provide ongoing support.
Throughout our engagement, you’ll see two primary core values in action – transparency and honesty. This is the foundation of a strong partnership. After we take you live, we stay in regular touch – by now we’re friends too!
Operations Review and Ongoing Best Practices
- Review support procedures and how to add Cloud PCs
- Participate in Beta Program?
- Review Workspot maintenance processes
- Introduction to Workspot Production Account Management Team
- Revisit regular meeting needs and schedule quarterly review meeting
100% Customer Commitment
This week we held our virtual 2022 Sales Kickoff with Workspot participants from across the company and around the world. The format of the presentations have perfectly reflected our learning culture. Of course, a ton of great information is being shared, but there is also time for listening and gathering feedback. One of the ways we are gathering feedback on all of the many topics we’re covering is through real-time polls. One polling question stood out from the rest for me. The Workspot team was asked:
“Whose voice is the most important and impactful?”
A. The Board
B. The CEO
C. The Customer
D. The Executive Team
E. Other
The votes rolled in quickly. The result? 100% of the responses: The Customer. That is the power of culture. Customer-centricity is so deeply embedded in our company DNA – across all the various roles in the company – that no one had any doubt; it’s always the customer.
Ready to learn more about how Workspot Cloud PCs can transform end user computing in your organization? Schedule a demo and we’ll discuss how we can address your unique requirements.