Inevidesk Vs . . .

A new contender enters the ring.

We compare Inevidesk to other industry agile working solutions to illustrate why our service wins hands down in terms of both performance and price.

Most Other Virtual Desktop Infrastructure solutions . . .

Pretty much every other VDI solution on the market uses established, high profile virtualisation technologies such as VMWare Horizons, Citrix and Nvidia GRID/ vgpus. Take a look at their websites and these will be the brands emblazoned to provide prospective customers with the assurance that this is serious, proven tech that will be a trusted platform for a reliable virtualised experience.

The critical element here however is cost. This is expensive tech, with an average cost per desktop (specified to adequately support use of Revit and similar software) of around £2,000 - £3,000 per year. That’s around the same price as a really high spec workstation, but paid out every year. Plus these solutions are often provided only in large tranches, perhaps in batches of 30 or similar.

Big money. Big commitment. And, of course, this immediately kicks the concept of VDI out the window for most organisations.

Which is where Inevidesk comes in. Our vdesks are around 30% of the price of other established solutions. And we achieve this by use of newer technologies, that provide the same – if not better – performance than our established competitors. We also offer our service in pods of 7 and with the ability to integrate easily with your existing infrastructure. So there is no need for any great over commitment.

Those organisations already using an established VDI provider generally claim a great ROI by the utilisation of virtualised desktops. How much greater would that ROI be if you could reduce the cost of your VDI service by 70%?

Azure

Microsoft’s cloud-based platform offers highly scalable virtual infrastructure where you can adjust your resources by the minute and only pay for the resources you use. Which sounds wonderful until you start to add up the cost of all those minutes.

And let’s face it, workers in the AEC industry can work long hours. These machines are not just needed 9 – 5, but often in the evenings and over weekends also. A lot of minutes. A lot of cost.

An equivalent virtual machine to Inevidesk’s mid spec desktop will cost around £2,000 per annum if used 9 – 5 for a year, so that’s a minimum spend. With Inevidesk,  our hosted mid-spec (available 24/7) works out at £810/ annum. That’s 40% of the cost. If you have 50 vdesks, that’s a minimum saving of £59,500 every year.

If scalability is your only driving factor, then Azure wins hands down. But can you justify the cost?

Inevidesk can supply pods within a few weeks (and often days if required), and once pods are in place you can spin up a new vdesk within minutes. All for a fraction of the price of hosting your VDI on Azure.

BIM 360

Not a virtualisation platform, but a solution that Revit users within the industry will be well aware of and which will already be in use in many places.

Now BIM 360 is an awesome service to enable collaboration on Revit models and when it is used to collaborate across organisations makes a lot of sense. But does that make it the right tool for a company’s internal agile working strategy?

We don’t think so. For a start, BIM 360 only supports Autodesk products. Fine for your Revit models, but what about everything else? You would need multiple other cloud services to support your wider needs and all of a sudden your data is decentralised and much more difficult to manage. Plus each additional service is another cost.

BIM 360 also requires that the user has a powerful device to run the software locally. If you want to be agile this means a laptop and a laptop powerful enough to run Revit adequately is going to set you back around £2,000 or more. That’s a lot of expense for staff to carry around and there will almost certainly be thefts and damage to factor in.

There’s also the issue of security. When your data is dispersed, both amongst different cloud services and being synced locally to laptops, that’s a lot of locations to keep secure. Your data will be inherently more vulnerable.

Finally, any service that relies on syncing is open to problems; time to sync data up and down, broken syncs causing corrupt files and data clashes.

Inevidesk comes in around 50% or less of the total cost of a BIM 360 arrangement, keeps all your data and resources in one central, secure location and only requires end users to use inexpensive, lightweight devices. Plus – if you need to – you can still use BIM 360 on our platform! Best of both worlds . . .

And to knock off a few others:

VPN: Ok for users who want to work on Office documents, but pretty useless for working on design files unless you have reliable, synchronous gigabit connections at either end. Also guaranteed to cause corruption issues with Revit models!

RDP: Remoting in to a physical workstation in the office is what most of us have been doing during the pandemic. Which was fine as a temporary solution. But why pay for office space to house fixed desks and physical workstations when you can move to Inevidesk, reduce your office space and save a small fortune?

Inevidesk is a new contender, and a much smaller enterprise than the tech companies we take on above. But we are fast, high performing and frankly, have the knock out punch.

Contact us so we can explain some more.