CIOs Are On A Fast Track To Digital Transformation

In my role as Workspot’s Chief Sales Officer, I speak with CIOs across many industries every day as we seek to understand the challenges they are having around aligning IT infrastructure with business goals. For many years, there’s been lots of talk about “business alignment”, becoming a “data-driven enterprise”, and “digital transformation”, but the execution around these initiatives has been anything but straightforward. However, in just the last year I’ve witnessed some pretty amazing changes, and the twists and turns in the road to digital transformation are yielding to a much more easily navigable expressway to success. What’s driving this dramatic change?

 Whoa! That Was Fast!

No one has been more surprised at the pace with which organizations have adopted the public cloud than Workspot. While we set our sights early-on to help customers make the transition to cloud computing, and we were ready the moment Microsoft implemented the required changes to Windows 10 licensing, we still expected it to take more time for organizations to make the move to cloud desktops. What happened instead is cloud adoption exploded. CIOs have been able to do the necessary internal selling to convince executive teams and boards of directors that three major things can happen with public cloud computing:

1. Security is enhanced. There was a “discomfort chasm” that had to be crossed to reach the realization that the big guys (Microsoft, Amazon, Google) can manage security better on their infrastructure than a company’s IT team can in their own datacenter.
2. Using highly skilled IT people to “keep the lights on” in datacenters no longer makes sense. Now the big guys will KTLO for you and your valuable people can do more important things that deliver strategic value to the business.
3. You have the opportunity to reduce IT costs while also gaining the agility that allows you to pursue new revenue opportunities.

What CIOs Really Want

Workspot is focused on delivering virtual desktops, apps, and workstations from Microsoft Azure, and moving those workloads to the cloud is a big part of the transformation that CIOs can now see more clearly. As I discuss our solutions with organizations of all sizes, one thing I hear over and over is “we do not want to be in the infrastructure business anymore”, and “we don’t like having to deal with hardware refreshes, especially with big workstations.” CIOs and their teams are getting really clear about what is and is not a good use of their time and resources. So much so that in recent weeks several organizations have told us they have new mandates that prohibit the purchase of additional data center infrastructure. That’s some serious clarity!

What’s really exciting is that we are helping open new doors for our customers when opportunity knocks. While most organizations across many industries struggle to get value from traditional, on-premises VDI solutions, in particular, the Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry really had some spectacular project failures. The graphics-intensive nature of their work means that those power users cannot compromise on performance, period. And that’s why the promise of VDI was particularly disappointing for these firms. Today, that conversation has completely changed, and even though some of these firms had negative experiences when they tried virtual workstations, we are able to show them a different way, that… wait for it… is risk-free to them and actually works! One customer who initially said “we’ve been trying to do this for 5 years without success,” recently said, “this has the potential to change our business – now we can hire anywhere in the world and pursue new projects we normally would not pursue.” That same customer is experiencing better than physical workstation performance with 10-12 ms latency, and just two weeks ago another AEC customer said: “We’re seeing ridiculous speed with Workspot on Azure.”

Workspot’s innovations in VDI are just the technology disruption CIOs have needed to accelerate their digital transformations.  See you on the fast track!