An end of year round-up
As 2021 comes to a close, we reflect on our first full year since launching Inevidesk.
This year has very much been about raising awareness of Inevidesk within the AEC sector. We have contacted many hundreds of organisations and had meaningful conversations with 60 - 70 firms, where we’ve found a number of common threads:
For most, hybrid working is here to stay.
Many are looking to reduce or reconfigure their office spaces to reflect this new way of working.
Most have decided not to invest further in physical tower workstations as they now require more flexible systems.
Most are considering their next strategic steps in terms of IT infrastructure and trying to identify the best platform to support their ambitions of greater agility and resilience against future shocks.
There is a common understanding that a better way needs to be found to support high performance CAD and BIM work in the future.
In light of the above, we’ve found organisations are very receptive to Inevidesk’s offer which addresses just about all the requirements firms have identified, whilst remaining affordable. It’s taken a lot of time and persistence to get some of those initial conversations and to overcome assumptions about what we do. But I can honestly say that - when those conversations happen - people are pleasantly surprised (if not outright shocked) at just what we have to offer and how our approach (high performance progressive tech for less money) is both refreshing and vital as the industry adjusts to new ways of working.
Decision making in the sector is slow (as many will attest!), but we have a growing number of clients - some of whom have taken the full leap to hosted VDI infrastructure, others who are implementing the service in an incremental fashion on premises. We have many more organisations actively considering adopting Inevidesk and anticipate that they will do so in 2022 as IT budgets are refreshed and ageing hardware is replaced.
Here are some of the organisations who have made the leap in the last year:
Architype: recently adopted an initial pod for proof of concept following a successful trial where we demonstrated huge performance efficiencies.
Aros Architects: recently ordered our fully hosted service, which they will migrate to in the coming months.
Cullinan Studio: migrated to our fully hosted service in the Summer of 2021 and opened up their canal-side building to more tenants due to office space efficiencies created by use of Inevidesk.
Eight Associates: sustainability consultants who moved to our fully hosted service to accommodate their very fast growth, improve their business resiliency, enable an efficient office move and better support their modelling team.
Flanagan Lawrence: implemented an initial pod on premises and now plan to move the remainder of their workforce onto the platform in the first half of 2022 to become fully hosted and agile in advance of a Summer office move.
GRID Architects: after a successful implementation of a couple of on premises pods early in the year they took the decision to move their entire team (60+ architects) onto our hosted service to accommodate growth in their team and improve their working capabilities and business resiliency.
HLM Architects: adopted an on premises pod after a successful trial to test with their team and consider further integration.
Hopkins Architects: continued with their incremental approach of replacing physical workstations with Inevidesk throughout the year and are now on course to support their entire 120+ team on the service by Easter 2022 with a migration to a fully hosted service.
Hutchinson + Partners: adopted a pod in early 2021 to enable their Berlin and Cardiff based teams to plug effectively into their London based infrastructure.
Lipton Plant Architects: our first fully hosted clients who made the move in early 2021, to support their new hybrid working model, dispersed team and enable better performance and collaboration.
Lyndon Goode Architects: moved to our fully hosted solution in the Summer of 2021, in advance of an office move, to enable high performance home working and replace ageing server and workstation hardware.
Weston Williamson + Partners: adopted a pod to plug their Toronto team into their London based infrastructure, mitigating the need for local infrastructure and keeping all data centralised and secure. Our vdesks work really well even cross-Atlantic!
In terms of development, we have endeavoured to respond rapidly to feedback and functionality requests and this year introduced:
dual display support (triple display if using your laptop screen also)
multi-factor authentication via both email and authenticator app
collaboration functionality via vdesk sharing
active directory synchronisation
Next year we intend to build on the work undertaken in 2021 and anticipate bringing on board many of the organisations we have been speaking with this year. We will be moving into our new datacentre private suite to accommodate our growing hosted customers, establishing an account management and support team, refreshing our website to include an online knowledge base and further developing the Inevidesk service to bring an even wider array of functionality. We’ll be extending our sales outreach to engineering firms and other sectors who will benefit from our high performance VDI and hopefully enabling many more organisations to improve their working agility, their business resiliency and enable them to function ever more effectively in what remains a challenging and unpredictable world.
In the meantime, we wish you all a very Merry Christmas and look forward to speaking and working with many of you in the New Year.