Inevidesk, the high-performance virtual desktop provider, started out five years ago offering VDI services to architects and AEC customers with high GPU requirements as a flexible, affordable alternative to traditional workstations.
Having made good inroads in that market, with more than 1,000 virtual desktops, or vdesks, at leading architect firms such as Grimshaw, Hopkins Architects and Morris+Company, Inevidesk is now taking its VDI offering to a broader customer base.
Last summer, it launched a partner programme to extend its reach into new markets and at the end of January it supported this strategy with the introduction of a flexible monthly licensing model and an expanded product suite suitable for customers with less demanding workloads than its existing AEC customer base.
In addition to its core VDI offering of vdesks with dedicated Nvidia GPUs, Inevidesk now offers GPU-less vdesks suitable for knowledge workers using standard office software and Intel Flex GPU options that allow multiple vdesks to draw on one card where a relatively low level of GPU resource is needed.
Both these options allow a very large number of vdesks to run on high-density servers located on a customer’s premises, in a datacentre or hosted by Inevidesk, which also offers IaaS (Infrastructure as
a Service) as a secure, local alternative to public cloud providers.
Here, to mark the five-year anniversary of Inevidesk’s first customer win, Technology Reseller asks co-founder Tim Whiteley about developments at the company and the opportunities for channel partners.
Technology Reseller: Briefly, what is Inevidesk’s VDI proposition and how does it differ to what’s available from the market leaders?
Tim Whiteley (TW): Before starting Inevidesk, I used to run an IT consultancy that primarily worked with architects in London. We had often looked at VDI because we could see the benefits it could bring to an industry that was conservative in terms of its technology use and very office-based. We thought virtual desktop technology could introduce a lot of flexibility and agility
to such organisations.
We’d done quite a bit of research on what was available, which was essentially VMware and Citrix and latterly hyperscalers like Azure AWS offering cloud-based desktops, but none of these addressed the particular issues our clients faced in terms of performance and cost. There was no way they would embrace VDI if they had to spend three to five times more than they were currently spending on something that probably wasn’t going to perform as well.
We felt there was a huge gap in the market and that if we could develop something that met people’s performance requirements and was cost accessible, we might be able to introduce VDI to the clients we had at the time and to other organisations.
Technology Reseller: Why were VMware, Citrix and others not attempting to fill the gap you had identified?
TW: It’s not necessarily the same across all industries, but in the AEC sector the need for quite high performance GPU compute and a lot of CPU meant the cost of VDI stacked up quickly. It was very expensive because of the licensing models of the existing vendors and because there wasn’t a lot of competition.
It was also very niche, to the extent that almost nobody we knew within our sector in the UK was using the technology in any way.
Technology Reseller: How have you been able to produce something more affordable and with better performance?
TW: Basically, by using open source KVM-based technology and building everything on top of that. Because we don’t use proprietary software, VMware, Citrix or anything like that, we have been able to cut out licensing costs, and because it’s open source we have much more granularity of control over what we develop, design and configure.
We also build bespoke hardware to suit each client’s requirements instead of buying equipment from the likes of Dell and HP. This enables us to keep costs low and control the performance of both the virtualisation layer and the hardware layer.
Technology Reseller: You set up Inevidesk in August 2019 and signed your first customer in March 2020. What impact did the pandemic have on your business?
TW: It was a very strange time because we were beta testing with a couple of organisations, and things were going well. Then the pandemic hit, and one of them immediately said ‘This is the kind of technology we’re going to need now’ and bought all our stock.
Covid changed people’s perceptions of how you can work and where you can work, particularly in the industry we were in which had never really supported hybrid and remote working – it was very office-based, with people sitting at desks with big, powerful tower workstations and a couple of monitors, working away on 2D and 3D designs. The pandemic showed that people could do this from anywhere, so long as they had a reasonable internet connection.
Suddenly we were able to have conversations about organisations’ infrastructure, where they employ people, how they connect multiple offices, including international offices, and how they use their office space. You don’t have to have one person per desk; you can be much more creative and agile.
One key thing that has come out of that whole period is the need to be resilient and to be agile, because no one knows what is going to happen in the future.
No one can say ‘This is how we’re going to work for the next 10 years’. You have to be able to respond to changes on an annual or even a monthly basis.
Technology Reseller: How have you grown since those early days?
TW: Slowly at first. We utilised our existing network to bed in our VDI technology, deal with any immediate issues and ensure everything was working and then just spread out from there through direct sales, events and webinars.
IT is all about trust, and people started singing our praises and comparing us very favourably to other ways of working and other solutions which helped us gradually build momentum and introduced us to a much wider group of people, including, in the last year, MSPs and channel partners that recognise what we’ve been doing and are starting to view VDI as an interesting addition to their portfolios.
Technology Reseller: How advanced are your plans to expand into other areas?
TW: We’re developing things quite rapidly, iterating month by month to introduce more flexibility, different functionality and different use cases.
Initially, Inevidesk was quite a fixed offering for architects and engineers, a virtual workstation with a dedicated GPU and this and that. It’s much more flexible now, to the point where we can serve anybody from a standard office worker doing lightweight office tasks all the way through to data-intensive AI applications.
In the last few weeks, we’ve released the capability to assign multiple GPUs to any one virtual workstation, which is looking like it might be a requirement for certain AI services that need to pull on GPU. We don’t quite know where that’s going, but it’s an example of how we are constantly building up flexibility and agility so that we, our clients and our channel partners can adjust to evolving needs and be a viable and valid solution for more people.
Technology Reseller: What are some of the key trends affecting the VDI market today?
TW: I think there’s still a pull towards the cloud, towards agility and resiliency and flexibility, away from on-premises hardware. Even though some high- profile organisations are demanding people return to the office, that doesn’t negate the need for flexible, agile and resilient infrastructure.
One thing we have noticed in the last couple of years is that quite a few organisations that jumped onto Azure in the early days and during the pandemic are now reconsidering being on the public cloud, partly because of its cost and complexity, but also because of increasing concerns about data protection and how people’s data is being used, particularly in light of large language models’ need
for data.
We’re definitely seeing a move back towards on-premises or private cloud, rather than handing everything over to one of the big tech vendors.
Technology Reseller: Do you provide your VDI for use on-premises and in a private cloud?
TW: Yes, we’re very flexible. We don’t want to predetermine how a client can use our service. You can take one of our pods with virtual desktops and plug it into your own on-premises infrastructure and work that way. We have quite a few clients who do that. And we designed it to be incrementally adopted, so no one has to take this huge, scary leap into VDI immediately; they can introduce it slowly and gradually replace legacy workstations. We’re seeing that happen quite a lot.
We run a hosted service as well. We have our own private suite in a data centre where we host quite a lot of our clients. We have infrastructure as a service that runs alongside that, so if they want, they can host everything with us.
Then, we have clients who prefer to host it in their own datacentre or who might be working with an MSP that wants to host in its data centre. We’re open to all those possibilities. We just want people to use our service and get the benefits from it.
Technology Reseller: How have the changes at VMware impacted you?
TW: VMware is one of the big players in the VDI market and has been for 15 years or so – it was only ever VMware and Citrix until quite recently. From our experience of talking to other organisations, it seems to be the most used virtualisation technology for servers and for desktops.
VMware has gone through a few owners in its time. It was purchased by Broadcom in 2023 and Broadcom quite rapidly decided to divest itself of the end user computing division, which includes the VDI services many organisations depend on. That was bought by a global equity
firm which subsequently relaunched it under the Omnissa brand, but among VMware users we’ve spoken to, there’s still a lot of uncertainty around what’s going to happen with that unresolved dependency between VMware and Omnissa and a lot of frustration about price rises, about the time it takes to get a quote, and about whether or not they can rely on it in the future.
We’re starting to see an appetite for alternatives, which is really healthy, because when you have only one or two tech giants dominating an area, you have to pay a lot of money and you don’t necessarily get the service you need.
Technology Reseller: What typically prompts customers to get in touch with Inevidesk and look at your VDI service?
TW: Quite often it’s because they’ve heard of us. It’s word of mouth from peers or maybe they’ve seen us talking on a webinar or something like that.
It’s generally prompted by that, and generally at a time when that business is looking to refresh their infrastructure and either replace everything or just their legacy equipment.
Interestingly, quite a few clients have come to us when they were having an office move, because they didn’t want to take everything with them. It’s a real effort to build a server room, and moving to a hosted platform like ours beforehand allows them to pick up their laptops, go to their new desk in their new office and start working.
Technology Reseller: Is sustainability an important factor for your clients?
TW: It’s something we talk about quite a lot, because VDI is a lot less carbon impactful than traditional physical workstations. Last year we commissioned a report from a sustainability consultant who calculated that one of our virtual desktops is 62% less carbon impactful than a similarly specified physical workstation.
That’s quite a shocking figure but it’s probably not as persuasive as we like to think it is. Many people have sustainability targets within their organisations, but they seem to be a secondary, tertiary or even lower consideration after performance and budget and operations. As far as we are concerned, the sustainability aspect of what we do is just one more really good reason to adopt VDI, along with its performance and cost-effectiveness.
Technology Reseller: What are your plans for 2025?
TW: Our main aim is to raise our profile. We’re starting to look at some events that we will attend and perhaps exhibit at. For example, we have just signed off on a stand at the MSP Show at the ExCeL in May. That’s not an AEC industry event, so it’s a chance for us to talk to a different audience. We’re also looking at a few industry-specific events and aiming to publicise the work we’ve done with partners. Basically, just to build on what we’ve done so far and to push into some new areas.
Spreading the word
How MSPs are helping Inevidesk reach new markets
Technology Reseller: When did Inevidesk start selling through the channel?
Tim Whiteley (TW): We started last year after a number of MSPs and distributors we had been speaking to expressed an interest in reselling the service. We’d been trading for three and a half to four years by that point and they could see we weren’t a flash in the pan. They could see we were getting more clients and better-known clients as well, including some of the largest architects in the UK who trust us enough to put their data and operations in our hands.
Direct Sales is hard work and trying to get through to organisations that don’t already know you takes a lot of time and effort. We could employ a large sales team to do that, but channel partners have those relationships already, so we think that is a much better route to go down.
Technology Reseller: How many reseller partners do you have now and how can they help boost VDI adoption?
TW: We have six partners so far. A couple are AEC specialists, but others deal with a wider customer base. Scan, for example, is one of the biggest technology distributors in the UK and now markets our service as their in-house hosted VDI solution.
One of the things we want to do over the next six to 12 months is talk to more organisations and more partners outside the AEC industry.
VDI is growing but in certain sectors it has a bad reputation because it never really delivered on performance, it was expensive and there were problems with downtime and outages. And that’s still happening.
Not all VDI services are the same and not all will necessarily be right for what the customer wants to do. Channel partners should use their knowledge of the range of options available to ensure they put appropriate solutions in front of customers and don’t just default to Microsoft Azure, which we’ve seen happen a few times.
The biggest challenges we face are awareness around what VDI is and does and recognition that what we offer is not the same as what a customer may have looked at a couple
of years ago or heard stories about. We are something quite different and that’s what we’re trying to get across to channel partners as well: we’re not like anything else you’ll be offering.
Technology Reseller: What opportunities are there for channel partners to generate additional revenue from your solution?
TW: We just offer the virtual desktop platform and, if you’re hosted with us, virtual desktop and Infrastructure as a Service – a whole hosted platform. We don’t manage the customer’s Windows servers. We don’t manage their security. We don’t manage any software. We don’t resell any other software. So we don’t take any custom away from channel partners that they would otherwise be making money on.
We’re not interested in becoming a one- stop-shop for everything. We want to concentrate on what we do and make sure we do it really well. Then, it’s up to channel partners to build it in as they see fit. They can package it up as something much more comprehensive or they can just sell it as it is. That’s the flexibility we offer channel partners.
Technology Reseller: Have you had to develop a particular portal for MSPs, giving them one place to manage all their clients?
TW: That’s designed into the system. The ability to set different permissions means we can restrict somebody to looking after just one organisation or create an umbrella organisation where an MSP can see and manage all of its clients.
We’re now working on the ability for them to brand the control panel with their own colours and add their own logo. We’re building in things like that all the time, and we’re talking to partners and prospective partners to see what they’d like and trying to iterate quickly and be really responsive to their needs.
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