CLOUD-NATIVE WORKSTATIONS – Strategy to Adoption and Everything In-Between

BRAD PETERSON: Hey, welcome to our session today from Workspot. It is a session entitled Cloud-Native Workstations and that Strategy to Adoption and Everything In Between. So we've got a great panel today of experienced folks to talk from the IT side and the power user side. And so to kick it off, let's do some introductions.

OK, so let's start off with the IT side, the technical side of administration, and deployment, and so forth, and lots of experience here. Matthew Davidson, would you like to intro yourself-- and hey, tell us where you're coming in from today.

MATTHEW DAVIDSON: Sure, Brad. I'd love to, and thank you. Happy to be here. Coming in to the meeting with everybody here today from Kentucky, the great bourbon state. My background-- I had the pleasure of leading the technology group for a national AEC firm, Nelson Worldwide, where we implemented a very strategic digital transformation around cloud PCs.

And it was so successful, and I believe so much in that technology that I wanted to be able to help other companies do that. So I recently joined Workspot as the field CTO, where I get to do that every day with customers, and help with the strategy, product development, and just helping them in their journey, very much like Workspot helped me.

BRAD PETERSON: Excellent. And welcome to the team, Matthew, for sure. Thanks, man. And tons of credibility on our side, and know how it's really helpful, especially on panels like this today, where there's a lot of folks coming in going, what is a cloud workstation and how do I get there? And boy, what does it feel like to use one?

And guess what? We have another expert on the user side, the power user side, that can tell you all about what it feels like to use it. In fact, we're going to get a live demo today, as well. So Adam, how about a little intro, and tell us where you're coming in from.

ADAM FARNSWORTH Yeah. Hey, I'm Adam. I'm coming in from Portland, Oregon. And I am a Civil CAD manager at Mead & Hunt. I've been using Autodesk products for over 20 years now. Started back in just the release 14 of AutoCAD, and moved my way up through LDT, and now Civil 3D. Using Civil 3D every day. Really heavy files, lots of grading [? types, ?] profiles.

And I use Workspot all of the time now. I'm able to work from home, and it has just been a wonderful experience. And I wait to show you what I've been able to do with it.

BRAD PETERSON: Perfect. And that's what we're here for today-- to get that experience, both the storytelling behind it and actually see it in action. So wonderful. Let's do that.

Hey, and by the way, to kick this off, we got a little warm up story to give you the background here. Because to do what we're doing now, cloud workstations, right? That's GPU-accelerated Windows 10 desktops coming to you out of the cloud. It's like, how do you do that? That sounds hard.

Well, historically, it was super hard. People tried to do it with VDI, so Virtual Desktop infrastructure. And when they did this, it was super complicated and expensive, and typically the users had to come from far away, so there were high latencies and bad, bad things from a user perspective, as well as a cost perspective, and an IT administration perspective.

And you can see on this little scatter gram of words in here, all the elements required to actually get it done-- images, and brokers, and application layering, and the database, and the profile management. It goes on and on.

So when you did that, you paid up front and you had to build it into your own data center. Often times folks were consolidating data centers down to a single data center. And now you had the expense of operating it, and you had all these folks coming in from so far away.

And you could never really provision it correctly. If you built it for 100 users, and you only had 50 engineers, and then later you acquired a company and then you had 150 engineers, it was never actually provisioned for the load you needed, right? So this was tough. This was hard to do in those days.

And so we figured this out now. So Workspot created a cloud-native system to actually create an abstraction layer across all the different public clouds out there anywhere in the world.

And on that, we can actually grab the microservices in those clouds-- the virtual CPU, and GPU, and memory, and storage, and networking-- and aggregate that together into cloud workstations for each user that needs one in proximity to where the user actually lives. So the latency is super low, and they can actually crush their designs. And as they collaborate with each other around the world, they use the super high-speed networks that are found in the hyperscale cloud providers.

So Workspot aggregates these together, delivers that desktop to you, and essentially becomes really the only multi-cloud and multi-OS platform for delivering these cloud PCs. And cloud PCs, of course, could be desktops or GPU-accelerated workstations.

Now, there's a lot of use cases for this. Call centers, of course. And as everyone went home during lockdown, they were able to actually-- whatever device they had-- they could connect in to a desktop in the cloud and they could function away. They could be a remote employee. They could be a contractor software development.

But as you see in the upper left hand corner, we're going to focus on the 3D and the 2D CAD designers-- the architects, the engineers, construction, manufacturing, and so forth. And how in the world did we get GPU-accelerated desktops in the cloud made available for these folks, where a lot of them actually found productivity went up as they deployed that. And that's what you're going to hear about today and then see in the live demo. All right?

Now, again, the difficulty here is there's so many pieces and parts that have to come together and work. And boy, if you think about a version on each one of these LEGO blocks, and they only work if you got the right version here, and if you upgrade one version they all start to fall apart, can't communicate. Well, even if you find a vendor that says, hey, we're in the cloud now, well, typically it's still a do-it-yourself project.

The yellow part that you see in front, the broker, that might be in the cloud. But what about the rest of it? What about the virtual machines and all the things I mentioned earlier-- the virtual CPUs, and GPU, and memory, and storage, networking. Where does that come from? Well, you're on the hook for building that out, and maintaining it, and so forth. And also the costs associated with that can really run away.

Well, the trick here is that Workspot aggregates all that together. Provides that as a full turnkey service. And the service level agreement is right down to the end user being productive on the desktop. So that's completely different than anything you've seen before, and it just makes things a lot simpler that way. And yet it's full on enterprise, and super high-end capacity and performance and security levels. And you're going to see that today.

Now, because of this, because of the way our customer success team actually works with the folks, we actually sent a survey out to everybody. It's called an NPS score, a net promoter score. There's only one question on it. You say, hey, would you promote Workspot and this service to your peers and your colleagues? And that's it. And it's a scale of 1 to 10.

So people pick their number between 1 and 10, send it back to us, and then it goes through a calculation, and then you come up with a score. And our total score was 76, which was crazy. It's super high. Our customers are very happy relative to all the other services that are in the world as they all get their NPS scores.

And it's just working super well with the folks that we've brought on board-- the customers, the end users, the CFOs, the CIOs-- they're all super happy with what's going on with Workspot. And we are here to tell you about that.

Now, what better way to start that story than to hand the microphone back over to Matthew, and hear about how as he was VP of technology at Nelson Worldwide, how he approached this challenge in his organization and the lessons learned there. So let's click over to this slide, and then I'll hand it over to Matthew.

MATTHEW DAVIDSON: Thanks, Brad. So like many AEC organizations, we needed to accomplish a couple of things with our end users out in the field. We needed them to be able to work and be productive when they would go out and do surveys, or they'd be working with a client out in the field.

And most of the times when they're out in the field, a cell phone or a mifi device would be the best type of internet connection that they could have. So traditional VDI solutions that we had in place-- and we used a couple of different manufacturers to do that-- they just couldn't provide that same desktop experience as if they were sitting in the office.

And then a national, or a global, pandemic hits and we have to send everybody home. For two years, Nelson employees worked remote. We had to still be able to be as productive, generate the same revenue and deliverables to our clients. So we needed to find a solution that was going to allow us to simulate the same working experience in the office, as well as being remote.

So we developed our criteria, our list of must haves, and we were not going to deter from that whatsoever. We were not going to go down the path of a solution that we had to work around. We knew how we needed to work, and the solution had to work around us.

So we needed a proof of value. We wanted to prove the desktop would work in our environments on our image with our users. We needed something that supported multi-platform Mac OS, iOS, Android type devices. We needed multi-cloud, support multi-region support, as there are 20 offices spread across the globe. GPU support-- absolutely a must have for the Autodesk applications, as well as other 3D apps.

We needed to be able to do a focused rollout. We were not going to do this over a weekend, where we rolled it out to the entire company and everyone started using a cloud PC all at once.

Centralized management was a big piece of this, as well as the company that we were going to partner with had to truly become an extension of our technology team, as we didn't have the resources in-house to be able to spend hundreds and hundreds of hours and thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars trying to figure this out on our own. We did that with VDI, and we were not going to do that again with the cloud.

So partnering with Workspot, it was a simple solution-- 500 GPU workstations providing multi-cloud support across three Azure regions that allowed us to scale globally. And it was also elastic, so the solution would grow and shrink as we needed it to as an organization.

It gave us a single pane of glass to manage the entire environment through the Workspot control. And there was a [? knock ?] that was monitoring the environment for us 24/7, 365. And the icing on the cake was the customer success team that was there walking alongside of us the entire time, and supporting and helping make sure that we had a successful rollout.

BRAD PETERSON: Hey, you know what and now what we've got is a bit of a diagram. Kind of a high-level diagram. That shows how you guys started and rolled out across the country to get coverage so that anybody anywhere could connect in

MATTHEW DAVIDSON: Yes, absolutely.

BRAD PETERSON: Yeah, do you want to describe that and how you started and then grew?

MATTHEW DAVIDSON: Yes. So we started with a single region. We started out testing with a single region. And when everything worked from that standpoint, from it being what we considered our perfected desktop and experience to the end user, we rolled that out to two other regions within Azure.

So US West 2 to service our teammates in the west, and then US East, and then South Central. So we're servicing the entire United States with three Azure regions today.

BRAD PETERSON: That's great. And the users coming in come in from-- the closest, maybe 20 milliseconds away, maybe less. And maybe the furthest, maybe 50 milliseconds away. Are those the numbers you're seeing?

MATTHEW DAVIDSON: Absolutely. So we were seeing anywhere from 25 to 30 milliseconds, which we were not able to do with our traditional VDI on-prem solutions.

BRAD PETERSON: And then with the workstation in the cloud, it feels like you have to have the data in the cloud, too. How did you manage that?

MATTHEW DAVIDSON: Yeah, so the data absolutely needed to be in the cloud in the same environment. Using Panzura, we were able to put a virtual filer in each one of our Azure regions, so that way the data is right next to the compute. So that we didn't have to deal with any latency issues and we were able to get peak performance, because, again, everything was right there together, just like it would be sitting in a traditional data center.

And the easiest way to explain that whole scenario is it was like capturing the data center, and just taking it and setting it into the cloud in each of the regions that we needed it to be in. That's the kind of performance we were seeing.

BRAD PETERSON: And then Panzura does the lock and sync between the regions, so that's cool. And yet everybody in region hit the hammers the data locally with the lowest latency and the highest speed between their cloud workstation and their cloud data, for sure. They're certainly not subject to VPN connections and trying to haul large files over those slow connections.

MATTHEW DAVIDSON: That is exactly right. File locks sync-- a must have. And Panzura provided that for us.

BRAD PETERSON: Beautiful. All right, now, so this-- we're able to do this these days and couldn't do this 5 to 10 years ago because the clouds weren't there. You couldn't leverage it. You had to build it yourself, essentially, right? And so that's where we're going next, the notion of-- and this is just an example of Azure. And of course there's AWS and GCP also.

And so as they grow and add more regions and data centers within those regions globally around the world, we can leverage those locations and those resources, and launch and deploy those workstations wherever those engineers might be. So you're not really even limited to hiring folks in country anymore. You could really hire them anywhere and get projects anywhere. At Nelson, had you guys considered that?

MATTHEW DAVIDSON: We absolutely did. And talking about some of the benefits, Brad, that cloud PCs enabled the business, it opened us up to a worldwide talent pool. It answered the question for how Nelson was going to grow and expand internationally.

No longer did we have to worry about setting up brick and mortar offices, dealing with all different types of different country requirements around technology. We could hire somebody, they could work from home, they could go to a shared workspace, and all we needed to do was set them up with a cloud PC.

So in a matter of about 15 minutes, and knowing their first name and their last name, we could quickly add them into our Nelson environment, and they were productive employees working alongside of the rest of the Nelson teammates. All while reducing costs and allowing us to move to what we were considering an infrastructure-less office environment.

BRAD PETERSON: Now, I get it. IC and CFO love that. And I'll bet the end user-- if you're hiring someone new, they love to be onboarded and get started right away. And if you're acquiring a company, and there's a lot of folks that got to be brought in, I'll bet the end users love it as well.

And by the way, we're going to find out right now. So let's turn the screen over to Adam. And again, he's a Civil CAD manager and FIT Program manager at Mead & Hunt, and has been using this for some time. Very experienced in this area as a power user. So you can go ahead and share your screen, Adam, and then we'll take a look at the live demo you got ready for us today.

ADAM FARNSWORTH: OK, awesome. I need to log in really quickly. Woops. Apologize.

BRAD PETERSON: And that's the Workspot client right there, I take it. Or the--

ADAM FARNSWORTH: There we go.

BRAD PETERSON: --workstation. Yeah.

ADAM FARNSWORTH: So here we are. I have a Civil 3D model here. This is an airport project that we've been working on for years. This is actually the final piece of a six or seven year-long project. Six or seven construction years of projects.

You can see we have a large existing ground surface. We have a proposed surface. If I zoom in and go underground, you can see all of the piping that we have. We have a really large detention system. We have all kinds of storm drainage for those airports.

All of this is in this file. This file is on the network. It's off of our Panzura drive. And you can see that this is a big, weighty file, and yet I'm able to spin it around. I'm using the 3DO commands, 3D orbits, inside of Civil 3D. And I can just spin this around and look at it. I have it rendered out as a conceptual model right now. So that's taking a lot of horsepower just to be able to see all of this.

BRAD PETERSON: Hey Adam, let's back up. Just one second. So you are at home, I take it, right?

ADAM FARNSWORTH: I am at home. Yup.

BRAD PETERSON: So tell us about the environment, the device you're using, your--

ADAM FARNSWORTH: Yeah.

BRAD PETERSON: Yeah.

ADAM FARNSWORTH: So I have a pretty standard laptop for-- it's great for Microsoft Word or Excel, but it cannot handle CAD programs. Not only can it not handle CAD programs, but even if I had a more powerful desktop at home, using a VPN just can't cut it. It's just these files-- all of the syncing that goes on, all of your data shortcuts within Civil 3D, files looking at other files to pull the data from-- it just can't keep up with a VPN.

So I am on, again, just a pretty standard laptop. I'm connected directly into my modem through an ethernet cord. And I'm on my Workspot computer. Now, I'm only sharing one screen here, but I do have three screens. And my Workspot takes advantages of all of my screens. So this is my work computer. This is what I consider to be my work computer.

BRAD PETERSON: Yeah. And this application is Civil 3D, right?

ADAM FARNSWORTH: This is Civil 3D here.

BRAD PETERSON: And that's one example. So you you've got-- that's the cool part, is you can install, oh, yeah, an additional application. And so what's this app you have here?

ADAM FARNSWORTH: Yeah, so this is ReCap. And this is a point cloud that I had another user scan for me. And this is a building that is going to have some renovations done. So this point cloud-- I don't have Revit on my machine-- but this point cloud is being able to be brought into Revit through ReCap.

So you can see as I move around, all of these points are data points. This is a lot of information, again, to on the fly be spinning around, zooming in and out, and getting the details of. I can get real world measurements from a real world scan of this point cloud.

BRAD PETERSON: So that's amazing. So how would you characterize this helping your productivity? Because you can reach this out of the cloud, you can work the hours you want, and various things like that. How would you characterize that?

ADAM FARNSWORTH: Yeah. Working from home has even-- it's unfortunate that it took COVID for a lot of companies to move to that. But honestly, it saves me an hour drive. I live far away from the office. And it was my own fault. I moved away. And so I didn't complain, but now that I have the option to work from home and be just as productive, it's a game changer.

Like you mentioned before, we can hire anybody anywhere, and we can spin up a workstation for them, and have them instantly be billable and efficient.

BRAD PETERSON: And is this helping a lot with collaboration? Like you've got other architects, engineers, designers, and they're coming in from home. And they're able to crush the same files you are, and share big files and data, and handoff projects. How's that?

ADAM FARNSWORTH: Yeah, exactly. Anyone with a Workspot. A lot of our users have Workspots. Some that have gone back into the office don't, but a lot have chosen to stay from home. And so we're all able to take advantage of the Workspots and be, again, just as productive as at home through Microsoft Teams meetings, and various Zoom calls. We're still able to communicate and collaborate, but we all have the necessary horsepower on our machines to continue to work.

BRAD PETERSON: Nice. So you can save money on the endpoint device. So hey, Matthew, when you think about this, Nelson is similar to Mead & Hunt in they have three regions of Azure across the country with Panzura-- you heard that, right? And then also the workstations up there.

And so it's an opportunity for you to give a great user experience, crank up productivity, but really saved quite a bit. There's costs that go away. And no more break fix, and laptop costs are lower, and so forth. Any thoughts in there? As IT folks ask the question, can I go into the cloud now, often times they don't realize the costs that go away.

MATTHEW DAVIDSON: Yeah. It's very strategic. And if you look at it from the standpoint of, well I have $100,000 to spend on a computer refresh, and I can buy x number of physical computers, or can I buy x number of cloud PCs, it's not a one for one. There is a strategy around how you implement cloud PCs, and it fits into your overall compute strategy for the whole company, right?

So we were able to-- as a technology group, we were spending $3.2 million a year in desktop compute-- and that includes different technologies, redundancies, and things like that were required to provide that PC environment, physical PC environment-- to actually adding $40,000 a year to our bottom line moving to cloud PCs.

So it's all part of an overall strategy. No longer are we bound by expensive 3, 4, $5,000 laptops, depending on the user, the need. They don't have stacks of computers sitting around anymore waiting for that perfect user to be hired for that perfect machine.

Again, as I mentioned earlier about the elasticity of the environment, that's from the Cloud Infrastructure standpoint within the different regions, as well as the machines themselves. So you can adjust those machine requirements as needed to fit the need of the user, along with as we see technology improvements and software, as software requires different memory and CPU and graphics, we're able to adjust those machines so that those teammates are always getting the perfect compute experience.

BRAD PETERSON: Nice. Let's go into that now. We can go into the details on selecting the right cloud workstation and performance-- well, the price performance-- just for the right use. So hey, Adam, thanks for the fantastic demo. Beautiful.

ADAM FARNSWORTH: You bet.

BRAD PETERSON: All right. So what I'm going to do is go ahead and share the screen again on my side here. And we're going to take a look at exactly what we were just talking about. Especially the GPU itself, right? So you can add more disk space if needed, memory, and so forth, but how much of a GPU do you need?

Well, the AMD GPUs on Azure-- you can get a full-on GPU, or cut it in half or quarter, and so forth. You can get it down into smaller pieces. And so as we go into here, we can see the offerings along the price performance curve of the desktops. Business, premium, and power-- those are the desktops. And then you've got business, premium, power, and PowerMax for the GPU-accelerated workstations.

Now, price performance curve. Find the right performance on the curve in the right price to dial in that user's productivity. Not too much, not too little, right? Just like Goldilocks on here. And then that's how you get your big return.

And then, Matthew, as you said, you guys-- like this graph you see here-- had to figure out exactly which applications would require which configuration to get the right point on the price performance curve per user. Is that right?

MATTHEW DAVIDSON: That's exactly right. One of one of the compelling things with this solution and something that really stood out to me-- in the old days of providing physical computers, you buy a computer that you think has the right amount of horsepower and compute for the end user, and you give that to them. And now, however they use that, whether they're using it to its full capacity or barely scratching the surface with the amount of compute that's in that machine that they have, that compute is tied up for that user in their physical hands.

Because of all the data that Workspot captures in that control plane, along with some of the different tools that they use, we were able to see exactly how much compute power each and every single one of our Nielsen teammates were using. So over time-- a six month period-- we were able to understand the exact compute requirements of those teammates.

BRAD PETERSON: Exactly. And by the way, if someone takes on new projects and adds new more complicated applications, you can make adjustments accordingly. You learn and tune according to that, which really helps you. And something you can't do when you take a static laptop and ship it out to someone. And then it's not enough or it's too much.

And so the dynamic nature of this gives you some amazing agility. So let's wrap this up with that cost and value benefit, and a bit of a summary-- as you looked back over the time-- the before, during, and after Workspot and Panzura deployment-- the summary that you came up with. Maybe you can hit a couple of highlights on some of these bullets.

MATTHEW DAVIDSON: Sure, I'd love to. So the biggest thing that stood out for me was just exactly how cost effective moving that workload to the cloud truly was. When we looked at it strategically from how that fits into how Nelson was using compute and how they were going to use compute in the future, it was a no-brainer.

Like I mentioned earlier, as a technology group, instead of the old mantra of, oh, the IT folks, all they do is cost money and spend money. Here, we were able to reduce cost and allow those teammates to be more productive, to be able to generate more revenue for the business by taking what had been downtime in the past and turn that around and turn that into billable time.

So that was the biggest thing that stood out for me, as well as how this played into perfectly-- the overall digital transformation strategy of moving workload to the cloud, not just from the workstation perspective, but from the server and infrastructure perspective, as well.

BRAD PETERSON: Nice. Yeah. I like this screen. It's got more bullets on it than we talked about, but you guys can screen capture that if you like it. And here's another one that I really would love to finish on today. And you can take a screenshot capture of this if you like, too. Because it's what are the salient points behind the challenges, and the solution, and the benefits?

Sometimes a diagram and these bullets like this help you communicate the value inside your company. And certainly that's, I think, the intent of Matthew, Aggregating and distilling it down to this. Any highlights you want to point out here that are the most impactful for the business?

MATTHEW DAVIDSON: Yeah, absolutely. And when you look under the challenges, digital transformation, AEC, 3D CAD, so Revit, 3D workloads, visualization-- we all used to be scared to death of that in the past. VDI could never answer that question.

And I remember the first conversation I had when I was a customer with the Workspot team going, I don't think this is possible. You're going to have to prove this to me. I just don't believe it.

And now sitting on this side as a member of the Workspot team going, oh my gosh, I need to evangelize and tell everybody in the world about how great this is because it can be done. Not only can it be done, but it can be done successfully, cost effectively, and allowing the teammates to be very productive.

BRAD PETERSON: Excellent point. And by the way, it can be done, and it is being done. We have so many customers out there that are actually massively successful at this already today, and growing.

Hey, so that wraps it up for our panel discussion today. I hope you guys really enjoyed it. Hey, if you want to reach out and get any more information or connected to us, it's super easy to find me. It's just brad@workspot.com.

If you have follow up questions, send them to me. I can forward them off to the group here, as well. And before we go, I'd like to take a minute to thank our guests. So Adam Farnsworth, thanks for a spectacular demo. Thanks for coming today.

ADAM FARNSWORTH: It was a lot of fun to be here. I appreciate you asking me to join and glad I could share.

BRAD PETERSON: Beautiful. Hey, thanks. The power user is the story. It really comes down to that. If you can't use it, and it doesn't fit your life and lifestyle and productivity, and so forth, then it doesn't work at all. That's like the way VDI was. But now it does. And so we have that great story. So thanks, Adam.

And then Matthew, thank you not only for figuring this out at Nelson Worldwide as the VP of technology, but then also understanding it well enough to come and join us and help tell the story.

MATTHEW DAVIDSON: Yeah. Thank you, Brad. I'm very excited to have done it. And I'm very excited to be part of the Workspot team. So thank you.

BRAD PETERSON: Beautiful. Yeah, we're excited to have you, as well. And Adam, you're on the team, too, man, all right? So it's a team thing here, for sure. We got a large team and it's getting bigger all the time.

All right, well, that's it for now. I hope you guys enjoyed the content. Reach out if you have more questions, Brad@workspot.com. And we hope to see you soon. Take care. Bye bye.