Powering High-Performance Working in the AEC Industry

Existing ‘big tech’ virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) offerings from the likes of VMware, Citrix and NVIDIA are too expensive, complex and poor performing for most architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) organisations to justify investing in. 

At Inevidesk, we address these significant barriers and have democratised VDI technology’s benefits to a much wider range of organisations – no matter their size. 

This is important for several reasons. AEC organisations have historically worked with fixed desk tower workstations and office-based servers, to enable both the high-end graphical computing and fast local network connections required for working on large, complex design files. This has limited agile working as employees have been tethered to their desks, which has restricted the easy coalescing of project teams in the office and the ability to work effectively from home or otherwise remotely. Such on premises arrangements also impacts business resiliency, with critical infrastructure often dependent on single power and internet sources or maintained within inappropriate environments (server rooms too often sharing function with the broom cupboard or drinks storage – bad ideas both).  

Inevidesk enables employees to work on demanding CAD and BIM software from anywhere with an internet connection and using only lightweight, inexpensive equipment to do so; supporting home working, satellite offices, international workers and more, whilst keeping all infrastructure (and data) centralised for improved security and ease of management. Whilst guaranteeing the same high level of performance they would experience sitting at their traditional, office-based workstations. We also create significant efficiencies for IT estate management, reduce power usage and create a pathway to hosted services for increased levels of business resiliency.  

So, what’s so good about our innovation and why we should win? In a nutshell, Inevidesk delivers… 

High performance. In order for our more accessible virtual desktop infrastructure to succeed, it needed to be capable of matching the performance of the traditional office-based workstation. And it does – providing an optimal experience for compute-heavy, industry-specific software, even over low bandwidth connections or at extreme distances, by reducing lag and providing a smooth working experience on even the most complex 3D models.  

Agile working. Customers can use Inevidesk to work the way they want to. Our platform allows them to collaborate within an office or remotely, supporting any organisations’ desired culture whilst delivering the best results for clients. In this way it is the ideal infrastructure for modern hybrid working practices. 

Greater power efficiency and higher density. Inevidesk packs way more resources into much less space than physical workstations together with a significantly lower power draw, which helps reduce both office and carbon footprints.  

Improved IT estate management. Inevidesk includes Active Directory syncing, automatic domain joining, remote power control, maintenance mode with VNC access and an intuitive administration portal to manage users and vdesks. New vdesks can be created in minutes, saving untold hours in machine deployment and managed completely remotely by IT administrators. 

Ease of implementation. The platform allows incremental adoption and can be integrated into existing on premises infrastructure, sited in a customer’s data centre or hosted by Inevidesk. The scale and style of deployment can be matched to each organisation’s needs and budgets. 

Business resiliency. Inevidesk provides a pathway for organisations to move to fully data centre hosted infrastructure, opening up the potential for much greater flexibility and business resiliency. In fact, about 60% of our customers have made this move already. The Inevidesk hosted platform is maintained in a Tier 4 data centre. 

Response rate. Inevidesk improves its service continuously, adding new features based on client feedback, often with a matter of weeks, which no big tech VDI provider can match. Our support team are industry experts. 

Transparent pricing. Inevidesk is around 50-70% less expensive than using other VDI solutions of a similar specification. Pricing is published on our website for transparency and to clearly differentiate the service from other suppliers who cannot do this. Accessibility was the key driver for us in developing Inevidesk; opening up progressive technology to all.  

But don’t just take it from us, listen to our clients… 

“Adopting Inevidesk has allowed us to reduce our overheads, increase the creative possibilities of our co-working hub, better support our new flexible model of working, improve the resiliency of our IT services, free up space taken by onsite server infrastructure, [and] effectively connect up our new Midland office.” – Peter Inglis, Practice Leader, Cullinan Studio  

“To be honest, I was initially a little sceptical as it’s such a different arrangement to the way we have managed things over the last twenty years, but I’m amazed by how easy it was to transition and the tangible difference adopting Inevidesk has made to our business.” – Julian de Metz, Director, dMFK. 

And finally, a few words from Tim Whiteley, co-founder, Inevidesk: “Inevidesk has been designed for specific needs of both end users and system managers. It is not generic tech offered by the likes of VMware or Azure, it has been built by my co-founder and I after identifying a need to offer an alternative to the big VDI vendors with an accessible and highly refined sector specific product. And we’re seeing it resonate hugely in the market – growing our client base by 200% between February and June this year. We are now truly out of startup and into scale up territory and to win this award in recognition of how we’re an innovative, credible challenger to the offerings of VMware, Microsoft Azure and Citrix would be the cherry on top of a successful year to-date.”