Hopkins Architects: One Year On

Hopkins Architects are a long established, highly respected architectural practice with a rich history of designing award winning buildings. Although primarily situated in London, their work is global and their technical infrastructure needs to support a large workforce with ever more demanding software requirements. These were driving factors in the practice’s early engagement with Inevidesk. One year on from their adoption of the service, Associate Director and BIM Leader Thomas Corrie looks back: 

“In mid-2019, we seriously started looking into a suitable VDI solution that could handle our increasingly complex BIM workload and allow our teams to collaborate better from multiple locations. Virtual technology felt like the right approach as it would give us the performance and flexibility we wanted, but also allow us to keep our data and resources centralised and secure. However, most services on offer were overly complex and expensive. Then we were introduced to Inevidesk, who not only offered an industry bespoke, high performance service, but also one which would be simple to adopt and sensibly priced. 

“The performance of Inevidesk during our early trial was really outstanding, with no real discernible difference from using our traditional workstations, plus integration of the ‘pods’ was very straightforward. This positive experience ensured that we were in a confident position to accelerate our adoption of the system in March 2020 when the pandemic forced us all into remote working. 

“The Inevidesk team worked closely with us to deploy the service more widely and the process was really quite painless. Guidance was clear and the team are highly responsive and expert, ensuring we felt that we were in safe hands throughout. In this way we have been able to move around half of our staff onto the system very smoothly, which has both improved our capabilities in terms of responding to the challenges of lockdown, but also helped us identify our post-pandemic strategy and the wider benefits of using virtual desktop technology. 

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“For example, we have been able to incorporate team members based in the Middle East into teams located in London without the need to sync data or maintain duplicate systems. In this way we have also identified cost and operational benefits of reducing satellite office equipment and the potential of making better use of our main office space. 

“One of the key improvements has been in IT administration. We can now deploy new machines in minutes rather than hours and better ensure standardisation of software. In respect of both time and security, these are big and easy wins and much appreciated by our IT department and project teams alike. 

“With all this mind we are able to expand our strategy by exploring a fully-virtualised and hosted infrastructure. This will both free up valuable real estate currently taken up by our server room and provide us with much greater resiliency in terms of our IT. 

“But perhaps the best thing about our evolution with Inevidesk is that it provides us with potential. We will have the flexibility to work how we want, where we want and when we want; to ensure we can continue to deliver the quality of work the practice is renowned for, whatever challenges come our way.”