Workspot Conversations with Customers: Cloud VDI Love at First Sight
During a recent conversation with a financial services company, one of the first things they said was “from the very beginning, we fell in love with Workspot.” That was my first clue that this conversation was going to go well! I want to share some of the ins and outs of this customer’s deployment experience because when you’re making a major change – in this case to a totally new technology platform – there is always trepidation. Am I going to get what I was promised? Will the vendor be able to deliver on time? Will my users be happy? Am I risking my job?
It is often the case that you don’t really know what you’re getting into until you’re in it. At Workspot our commitment to customer success runs deep, but our customers are much better at telling that story than we are.
Legacy VDI is Out
This organization did not want to manage physical desktops any longer, so they turned to a managed service provider who hosted legacy virtual desktops for them. Over time they became increasingly uncomfortable with the implementation for several reasons:
Loss of Control: To effect any change, they had to go through a cumbersome request process that took days or longer, even for the simplest change.
Cost: Legacy VDI is pretty well-known for being expensive, and this company was feeling the pain.
Performance: Unfortunately the performance issues they encountered included everything from network issues and slow connection times, to issues caused by client updates and complete outages.
User Experience: One manager said that upon arriving at her office, she would enter her login credentials and then go grab coffee and breakfast because it took that long for her to gain access to her applications.
Performance issues that lead to poor productivity and full-on outages are costly for any company, but the costs for financial services organizations are shockingly high. Every minute counts and the cost of lost productivity adds up fast. For these and more reasons, it was time for this company to find a better way.
Workspot on Azure is In
The IT team had been begun executing on their cloud-first strategy, and they decided it was time to seek alternatives to the incumbent VDI solution. We often find that desktops are the first workload our customers move to the cloud; then other workloads and data follow. Moving desktops to the cloud is a high return activity and migrating them to Azure using Workspot usually happens in 30-90 days, depending on the competing priorities of the customer’s IT resources.
The team began researching VDI solutions on Microsoft Azure; they discovered Workspot, and from there, the engagement evolved very quickly.
What IT Thinks Now
The IT team had an overall great experience from the sales process all the way through to production. That is really nice for the Workspot team to hear! The IT manager found it “very simple” to generate the templates they needed and then create the virtual machines. Throughout the go-live process, the Workspot Customer Success team was there to help. “Their responsiveness is really great. We always knew there was an individual we could reach out to and they would get back to me right away. It is greatly appreciated.” They also found the training process to be very helpful and they felt well-prepared to go live. They found the documentation Workspot provides to be really useful and easy to consume as well, so much so that they can find the answers to most of their questions without contacting Workspot support. They were “really confident that what we signed on for is what we were getting.” Today, the IT manager reports that he is pleased to “have the control I need to make changes easily and quickly to support the business. Recently I rolled out 16 new cloud desktops in a few minutes.” Always wanting to hear both the good and the bad about a customer’s experience with us, I asked them if there was anything we could do better, and the IT manager said “Hmmm. I’ll have to get back to you on that.” They do have one feature request for Disaster Recovery Cloud, and we were happy to be able to share that it’s already on a short-term roadmap.
What Users Think Now
Users have been pretty quiet – and apparently, that’s a good thing! They were up and running fast and became familiar with Windows 10 quickly. There was literally zero learning curve for Workspot. The Workspot client is elegant, simple, and blazing fast. Feedback so far is that users are amazed at how fast they can connect and open files. It no longer “takes forever” to connect and there’s no more sitting around and waiting for files to open. Response times are great, so everyone is more productive than before. Users should not have to worry about the technology behind the scenes (in this case, in the cloud); what they need is fast, reliable access to their apps and data that just works, and that’s exactly what they have today!
The Workspot Difference
In a recent blog we talked about our Customer Success DNA and how that impacts our customer engagements every day. This customer conversation brings the discussion of goals alignment to life, and we couldn’t be happier that this company really feels our commitment – in all of our ongoing interactions – to making them successful.
If you‘re ready to learn more about how cloud VDI is transforming enterprises, schedule a demo. We’d love to hear about your unique requirements and help you reach your business growth objectives.
