Nerdio is bringing its IT as a Service management system to Microsoft Azure. The company's thesis goes something like this: Many VARs and MSPs already deploy and manage Microsoft Office 365 for customers, but most partners have yet to monetize Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform. If Nerdio’s tech works as advertised, it may be an opportunity for those partners to build a business in the Azure market.
Nerdio got its start in 2005 as a managed service provider offering a hosted backup platform. Since then the company’s been growing its solutions to include things like Desktop as a Service, Disaster Recovery, Remote Monitoring, and a plethora of other services.
This latest offering addresses critical challenges facing cloud solution providers (CSPs), says the company. CSPs have struggled to move SMB customers to Azure as they strive to improve their services and offerings. Migration and management can be costly and comes with a range of complex issues.
Nerdio for CSPs and Microsoft Azure
Nerdio for Azure (NFA) is designed to bring a customer’s entire IT environment to Azure in just three clicks and a couple hours, the company says. It offers provisioning, management, and optimization of entire IT environments in the Microsoft Cloud while providing improved monitoring and management capabilities to CSPs, Nerdio adds.
Key features of NFA include:
- Automated onboarding and migration tools that shift workloads from traditional IT environments to Azure.
- The flexibility to configure desktop size on a per-user basis.
- The ability to combine dedicated virtual desktops (VDI) and shared RDS sessions to optimize performance, isolation, and cost.
- Support for heavy graphical workloads for engineers and designers, such as the ability to run CAD, architectural, and video editing software using Azure’s GPU-enabled instances.
- Intelligent, usage-based auto-scaling capabilities that adjust compute resources by resizing or shutting down remote desktop hosts and VDI desktops when not in use.
- Desktop performance monitoring that utilizes actual end-user experience insights rather than traditional system metrics.
- Automated complete system backups and out-of-region disaster recovery.
A Little Leverage
NFA adds to Nerdio’s already extensive platform, which was designed to replace on-premise IT. The company has been successfully selling directly to customers for years, but NFA looks to be another step toward leveraging partners and channel integration.
Call it IT as a Service, call it Desktop as a Service, just don’t call it boring. There are a number of companies vying for market share in this sector right now. Dozens of software and cloud companies are in the market -- including giants like Amazon Web Services, and the Microsoft-Citrix relationship on Azure.
